[...] I vowed not to give or lend him any more books after that and whenever he asked me what I was reading subsequently I would answer most mellifluously, ‘Something that you’d find very dull but that I happen to like a great deal.’ And we’d both laugh at that, which was better than the air turning sour, and then he’d tell me all about the life of the great man he was currently reading up on and it seemed to me that the biographies he read were always very flattering, I was surprised he was taken in by them – that he read biography ‘in a state of bovine equanimity’ as Janet Malcolm memorably puts it in her gripping investigation of the subject, and then I realised he really did want to believe in greatness and had no interest in reading a more critical or even-handed assessment of this or that man’s life, and I realised too that he wanted very much to impress upon me this idea of greatness which was so fundamental to his outlook, so sometimes I suspected that he wasn’t telling me the full story, that he was glossing over the parts of this or that man’s life – including his own – that were not so great at all, as such I invariably found what he told me lacking in nuance and credibility and so boring therefore and he probably sensed that, which again made things a bit strained between us, but of course it would never occur to him to say ‘something that you’d find very dull but that I happen to like a great deal’ whenever I asked him what he was reading. I hadn’t read any Georges Perec or Robert Musil or Hermann Hesse or Stefan Zweig or Paul Bowles. The boyfriend who recommended Seize the Day gave me The Sheltering Sky, I still have it, he wrote inside it. I was amazed by that book, totally seduced by it [...]