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Jim included the following passage from The Wicked Pavilion (1954) by Dawn Powell in one of his letters to me:

Sloane, so it seemed to him now, had never had to make a decision before in his life. There were always two paths, and if you stood long enough at the crossroads, one of them proved i…

Everything about Jim was in huge proportions: over six foot three, he was lean and lanky, with a luxuriant mantle of shining jet hair cast carelessly over his elongated back, and a leopard walk, his limbs curving forward like a giant, caged cat. Jim had the most majestic hands; to say they were the…

I first met Jim in New York in August 1970. I had been in New York for three days. He invited me to go to a concert with him in Central Park to hear Alicia de Larrocha play Liszt and Ravel. It was a dramatic pause in my first few days of furious tourism.

The skyscrapers of the city rise in mammo…

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

A crisis of illness, bereavement,…

Enter Mr Bates. Mr Bates is the bowel specialist who operates with Mr Wong in cases of ovarian cancer, the pattern of whose metastases typically involves the bowel. A former Rhodesian, Mr Bates is large, alternately bluff and jovial; he belongs to a Scottish malt whisky fraternity. I first met him …