Yoga: From the bestselling author of THE ADVERSARY

suddenly interrupted by Paul’s stunned, almost shocked voice: ‘Emmanuel, what are you doing? How are you typing?’ I look up, not really following. ‘Tell me it’s not true: are you typing with one finger?’ ‘Yes, I’m typing with one finger. I’ve always typed with one finger.’ ‘Now wait a minute,’ Paul goes on with growing amazement, as if he was gradu

Arranging things end to end like this is the first step when you edit a film. In cinema jargon this first version is called the assembly cut, and nobody in their right mind can believe it’ll result in something watchable – or readable if it’s a book. And then, once you’ve overcome the urge to toss the whole thing out, you get down to work, you asse

love this sentence by the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing: ‘It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.’

My friend Ruth Zylberman sent me these two short letters from an eight-year-old boy to his grandmother during the 1936 purges in the Soviet Union. The first: Dear Babushka, I’m not dead yet. You’re the only one I have in the world and I’m the only one you have. If I don’t die, when I’m grown up and you’re very, very old, I’ll work and take care of

‘If you’d known, what would it have changed?’

At length I explained to him that life had brought me to a dead end from which there was no exit, and that the only way out for me was suicide. When you say something like that, you expect to be contradicted. But instead of contradicting me, Roustang had said softly: ‘You’re right. Suicide doesn’t get very good press these days, but sometimes it’s

‘Poor Little Boy’,

And the liaisons between syllables. Ah, the liaisons! They’re the touchstone in the art of saying a text in French. And a real brain-teaser. Must they all be pronounced? Not all of them, no.

They lie for twenty-odd years the way Jean-Claude Romand – whose devastating story I spent seven years writing – did, and then they end up massacring their family, wife, children, parents and dog, because now that we’ve come this far into the void, that’s all there’s left to do.