A sense of humour is a serious business; and it isn’t funny, not having one. Watch the humourless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humourless can programme themselves

These forty pages are by many magnitudes the worst he has ever written.

And there is no companionship; there is no human curiosity.

(‘a miserable mediocrity’).

whatever identity is, whatever the soul is, the institution is its opposite and its enemy.

extreme, exclusive, almost a one-man genre.

the steady smile of envious admiration;

The quest did what quests very rarely do: it ended.

‘Drop that pistol,’ he tells Humbert: ‘Soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting.’