Sublime

‘You’re our longest-serving contributor,’ said Carleton, flinching at the bang. ‘Our most admired. Indeed I should say our most popular.’ I’m beginning to speak like him, he thought: Thomas Hart is catching, that’s the trouble. ‘I’ve often heard it said that it’s a consolation – that’s the general feeling, as I said to the board – to wake on Thursd

return. In some quarters he’s believed too sentimental to be taken seriously, and fatally flawed by a tendency to think too kindly of his characters – but Thomas believes that any writer who thinks himself better than the products of his own imagination should seek out some more appropriate profession (such as dentistry, for example, or the constru

‘the morals of the

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

The Salzburg Train.

personal and authentic.

“What’s

Paul Smith