Sublime

I found Toronto an immensely likeable city, spacious and gentle and slightly dignified, but in a low-key, friendly way. The only people who didn’t seem to think much of it were its inhabitants, who could hardly wait for you to ask directions, because that gave them the perfect opportunity to apologise for it. What they were apologising for I never

used to think that the world was basically sane with patches of madness here and there which would recede as rationality and good jokes pushed their boundaries ever inwards. Now I have the opposite view entirely. But one of the patches of sanity that I treasure is my memory of St Peter’s, where people seemed to be doing a useful job in a

Now, the man who gives himself away does the last act of generosity; he is like a martyr, a lover, or a monk. But he is also almost certainly what we commonly call a fool.

By now I’d been in New York for about six months and I recall writing down the impressions I’d formed of the people. I’ve lost the original, but can still reconstruct the gist. 1. America had what seemed to me an extraordinary reverence for anyone with lots of money. In England, to appear to be very interested in the old spondulicks was, as I said