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On my way out of the Athenaeum, so tired I could hardly speak, I was approached by a young woman.

‘I heard you read that story about the friend. The painter. It made me very angry. I thought it was a cruel story,’ she said, clenching her hands. ‘You took all the little illusions that people use …

V’s proprietary tone when he speaks of the high priests of European literature—‘Yes, they are peculiar titles,’ he says about Canetti’s autobiography—reminds me of the German poet who boasted to me about how he had once sat up all night reading Chekhov’s letters. As if no one else had ever done thi…

A doco about Berlin after the war. Footage of a boy of eight or so picking his way across a huge pile of building rubble, cap on head, pack on back, bare knees, boots—answering the questions of a disembodied voice: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ve lost my family. I’m looking for them.’ ‘How long since …

Primrose Gully. My sister comes down the track from the car, all in black, sunglasses, white-faced, like a refugee. Very upset and weeping. The married man she’s having an affair with, his coldness in public, his failure to turn up, she lay awake all night waiting. Disgusting memories of my own. I …

‘Afterwards she repented it bitterly, but she was hopeless at apologising: instead of retracting her feelings, what she always did was to say that she was sorry for expressing them, a kind of amends that costs nothing and carries the built-in rebuke that the other person is unable to bear the truth…