Sublime

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

It was the Economic Attaché. He beamed down at us from the terrace above, a great warm welcoming smile, full of confidence, like the man who keeps his friends because he uses the right deodorants.

You may think: What’s happened? Good God, are they kidding? But it is a rule of life, alas, that nobody is kidding.

Edie pointed to the freaky, frondiferous doll.

Toughness rendered tender, even beautiful.

She thought of him as a source of knowledge rather than experience; a good, though not contemporary mind, a person rather than a man.

He became his own fame, a fame that was interwoven with his masculinity. He became a human synecdoche for the condition of literary virility.

I gathered up my reserves of cheer and decided to

He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose. A mindset so UnitedStatesian, you could serve it with ketchup. But, friends, you cannot live on ketchup.