The Great Fire: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

To deny the external and unpredictable made self-possession hardly worth the price. Like settling for a future without coincidence or luck.

Woman’s sympathy should be complete, untainted by the reproach of common sense.

This, which was signed “Oliver,” was far and away the most feeling letter that the adult Aldred had received from his father. It was written in a sprawling but legible hand that showed no sign of age. Oliver Leith’s letters were usually dictated to a machine. Typed up, on a special size of small stationery, by a secretary with whom he had long sinc

Truthfulness was his last whole good, the thing he had not sheltered or kept small for safety. He had brought it out of the fire, not intact but with appropriate scars. As an abstraction it could not help him, lying inert in the Asian afternoon. Whether it retained any private power remained to be seen.