The visitor came in with the self-possession of a person who understands they cannot pass without notice, and judges nobody for noticing.

Towards the end of September, the sun crossed the celestial equator, and briefly the opposed forces of night and day were more or less equal in Essex.

Most stars, I’m told, are binary stars, and these pairs affect each other profoundly. One star might waylay another in space, but find in due course it suffers from this new proximity: it is possible for one star to draw matter from another in what they call mass transfer, growing larger and more bright at a dreadful cost to its companion. In this

The two men walked together to the safety of the hall behind Bethesda, where time never passed, and never tried to: the white cloths on the trestle tables, the steel tea urns, the Ten Commandments bleeding ink behind their mottled glass, all resisted the ticking of the gallery clock.

paths should cross at certain times on certain days. That they’d become friends seemed to her both natural and miraculous. From the minute she’d seen him blinking behind the hard dark ranks of Bethesda’s pews, she’d felt he belonged to her: evidently God had ordained the whole business.

Stitched among the whorls were so many seed pearls, in such a massed weight, the dress could only have been worn by a strong woman whose love for extravagance and style exceeded the desire for comfort.

It struck him that he’d never been so happy, but was wise enough to understand that his happiness consisted largely of hope. Their meeting in the ruin had been intimate and strange, and had sustained his spirit for days; but quickly they’d reverted to their easy pretence of being boys with a mystery on their hands. So they spoke only of where Maria

return. In some quarters he’s believed too sentimental to be taken seriously, and fatally flawed by a tendency to think too kindly of his characters – but Thomas believes that any writer who thinks himself better than the products of his own imagination should seek out some more appropriate profession (such as dentistry, for example, or the

And why does he never name the mother of his child, who presumably nursed him when things were bad, pressed pills out of their packets when he needed them most, washed him, held his body when it was pliant with sleep, saw the stitches dissolving in his spine?