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Although he liked nearly everything else about himself, Keith hated his redeeming features. In his view they constituted his only major shortcoming - his one tragic flaw. When the moment arrived, in the office by the loading bay at the plant off the M4 near Bristol, with his great face crammed into…

It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniac worry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. There were hardly any Arrivals, apart from me. The business of the airport was all Departures. As I stood …

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it…

'I get the impression that she's living on two different planes at once,' I said. 'She's perfectly lucid, and at the same time she tells herself that you're madly in love with her and that she could have been the greatest singer of the century. I think that her lucidity will win in the end. But wha…

I was astonished at how little she understood me, but as a matter of fact I didn't understand her very well either. She believed that, for us, work was nothing but a means of achieving fortune and success, and I was vaguely convinced that all those snobs would have gladly traded their social positi…