Yoga: From the bestselling author of THE ADVERSARY

Mr and Mrs Térieur had two boys, twins. What did they call them? Alex and Alain. I love that joke. In French Alex Térieur means ‘on the outside’, and Alain Térieur means ‘on the inside’. And with every book I write, there’s always a moment when I think it could be called The Brothers Térieur.

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.

That’s a classic metaphor, the buffalo in its pen. It symbolises the mind: powerful, capable of great tasks, but also wild, impulsive, perpetually charging off in all directions. It must be tamed. That takes time, patience, skill. We let the buffalo run wild in its pen, then, tirelessly, we bring it back to its post. At the end, the trainer holds t

Diogenes,

yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

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

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

‘Poor Little Boy’,

The writer André Malraux relates a discussion he had with an old priest: ‘You’ve spent fifty years listening to people in the secrecy of the confessional, what have you learned about the human soul?’ The priest: ‘Two things. First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks. And second, there is no such thing as grown-ups.’ There are no gr