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The day was uncommonly hot for autumn. Rich shafts of sunlight poured on to the representational carpet, and the dust-specks played in them like tiny tropical fish.

Le Carré's poetics of the workspace

Soon the gloom of the place seemed to work itself into the fabric of his face, like dust into the complexion of a prisoner.

(Strikes me as a fitting observation on the eve of returning to the workplace ;)

The Italy resulting from the plebiscites seemed artificial &deficient in national character.Italian culture still lacked a distinct identity of its own: the intellectual classes looked to France for their lead &other liberal politicians to England.Regional self-suffiency could not be broken down & there had been no social revolution to convince the peasants that they were participants in,not victims of,the new order.

Vittorio Emanuele became King of Italy in 1861.Because of the challenge of republicanism and the need to overshadow Garibaldi in popular esteem, an official apologetic and panegyric was developed to inflate his reputation.The true picture hidden behind clouds of incense is of a usually insignificant man,good-natured and shrewd,but superstitious and ill-educated, possessing little of the luster and aureole of majesty.

Late that night Kate, on her way to bed, looked into Lou's bedroom. Milky moonlight fell through the open window across the bed. Lou lay on her back with one braceleted arm outside the covers, her upturned toes, her breast, lifted the bedclothes to make a shallow trough between. She looked as touching as Juliet on her tomb. The moonlit drapery was like a drawning by Blake. 'There should be angels', thought Kate.

She refilled the glass and handed it to him, holding it carefully turned one way. He put his hands over hers and twisted the glass round so that he drank from the place her lips had touched.She hoped that he would not sense through her tingling fingers the embarrassment she was feeling, and raked her mind desperately for someting casual to say. Only the weather came to her rescue, as it always does to English people.

'What do we get out of it, I wonder - being parents?' 'It was great fun when they were little'.It was a memory of a memory by now - the hallmark of happiness, that scene.The sun had shone through the dazzling aigrettes of water and made rainbows, the breeze caught the the children and fanned them out. 'It's a pity about love', she said. 'The pain one pays for it with - children, or one's friends. It can't be helped.'

I hate self-made men. They think everyone else should slave as they have done. 'You missed the lot", I'll say to him one day."Grubbing about like that from morning to night, you never lived.What have you got?A great stack of money,a knighthood,the respect of your competitors,and that's about the lot.Not a moment's fun have you had.No one's ever been really pleased to see you and no one will give a damn when you die."

The heat of the white pebbles warms my belly, the salty sea leaves white streaks on my brown skin. It is paradise, but I am not happy. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.

Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness.

Ni Carmen ni Georges Maillot ne lisaient jamais rien. Nous en avions parlé tous les deux et vous m'aviez expliqué gentiment qu'il existe deux sortes de gens: ceux qui font les livres, et ceux sur qui les livres se font, et qui n'ont pas besoin de les lire. Ils les vivent.

Baudelaire is a new type of critic, one almost entirely dependent on his own reactions, his moi. He believes that his reactions to paintings or music or literature are as valid as the things themselves. He is, in every context, an artist in his own right. Criticism, as practised by Baudelaire, is an autonomous discipline.

Romanticism succeeded in literature for far longer than it did in painting. Literary Romanticism is capable of many mutations because it does not rely on standard imagery. For Baudelaire,Romanticism represented the kingship of the imagination, as it did for Delacroix. The final phase of the Baudelairian attitude implies that the cult of images signifies consolation, compensation for the ills of contemporary life.

Napoleon is the presiding genius of mature Romanticism. Even the later phase, represented by Musset and Vigny in literature, by Delacroix in painting, will be steeped in nostalgia for an heroic way of life.

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He bombards it&each time the smoke clears,the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted,he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway.Braque,he says, merely has 'charm'; he has gone back to 'French painting', becoming the 'Vuillard of Cubism'.He tells him his pictures are 'well hung.' Braque replies that Picasso's ceramics are 'well cooked'.

You don't think people change,you say,or ever really can?
I think people change,he says,for sure,but only ever become, essentially, more themselves.
You don't know if that thought is comforting or profoundly sad.
Then where's the hope,you say,if we can never truly begin again,or become,I don't know,something else or better?
He shrugs, and smiles.Each moment,I guess,he says. Each moment, here now, that's what we have.

Colour was regarded as suspect by classical Cubism: it was 'anecdotical', it blurted, it carried too much information, it distracted from the pursuit of form. So it had to be whipped into line - literally: that old French battle between colour and line was now taking a new turn. By 1910-1911 you could have any colour you liked, so long as it was grey, brown or beige.

Bonnard is the painter of the Great Indoors, even when he is painting the Great Outdoors. One London critic,infuriated by such dense luxuriance, described the gardens glimpsed through Bonnard's windows as 'over-planted'. At last, a painter brought before the tribunal of Gardener's Question Time ('And whiles we're about it,that Douanier Rousseau's feller's bin plantin' too many of them giant succulents on his patch').

At one stage Romantic meant anything capable of being described in a novel ’dans un roman’. Even within the limits of this definition, one is legitimately aware of the fact that the Romantic Movement in France leans towards forms of literature: predominantly pastoral or pantheistic in England, predominantly revivalist and nationalist in Germany, Romanticism is consistently literary or theatrical in France.

What sense does it make that after 19 years & 11 months have elapsed a crime can still merit the severest of sentences,but not 30 days later?Does time convert sth that existed into sth that didn’t?Justice is absurd,a fantasy,impossible.We act as if justice existed &we happily dish it out when there can be no justice.Accepting its meaningless rules is another matter,we have to do something to keep up appearances.

Cézanne was well read in the classics; and also proved that it is possible, if rare, to be a Balzacian, a Stendhalian and a Flaubertian all at the same time. Monet called him 'a Flaubert of painting': certainly, Cézanne had the monkishness required; also the belief that the artist behind the art should remain obscure. Though he was also - unlike Flaubert - rather prudish and proper when it came to women.(1/2)

Zola needed his literary success to be expressed in material terms: big house, fine food, social advancement, bourgeois respectability, whereas the better known Cézanne became, the more he avoided the world. In his later years, the painter was living in a quarry, seeing as few people as possible, and reading Flaubert. In the modern world, one of St Antony's temptations would be that of artistic success. 

And now they were all dead, and this was true loneliness: there was no one left to talk about her childhood, and now she was alone with it. There was no one left who could tell her things she couldn’t remember when they were children.

All ages feel that their conflicts are equally serious, a matter of life and death. They consider that their circumstances justify extreme measures. Every age believes itself to be exposed to great dangers , and every age is prepared o break its own established rules and regulations , to feel constrained by its own restrictions and to find ways of ignoring them or getting round them .

That night I genuinely didn’t know what to do, but I did, of course, stay with Tomas. You would need to have lost an awful lot before you’d be willing to renounce what you have. You curb your impetuous urges , your expectations , you accept the somewhat tarnished version of what you were hoping to achieve or thought you had achieved , and besides, there are disappointments and imperfections at all stages of life .

As all we know, imagination is often far wilder than reality, even if it lacks the latter's precision and terrible force, so you can always dismiss what it tells you and say to yourself: 'That might well not have happened, and since I have no idea what really happened, nor ever will, why torment myself with conjectures?’

Peace,alas,is only ever apparent and transitory,a pretense.War is the natural state of the world.Often it’s open warfare,but when it’s not,war is always there in latent or indirect form or is merely a war-in-waiting.There are large portions of humanity who are always trying to harm others,or to take something from them,and rancour and discord reign at all times, if not, then they’re in the wings, watching and waiting

Those were the days of the so-called sexual liberation,which was permeated by the idea that there was barely any difference between having sex with someone and having a cup of coffee with them,as they were equivalent activities, &as if neither should leave behind any trace or sense of unease.(Even if no memory remains,the event does at least leave a trace, perhaps only in our knowledge &awareness that it did occur)

When she believed that her husband was her husband, she felt less at ease and found it harder to get out of bed and begin the day, she felt a prisoner of what she had so long been waiting for and which had now happened and for which she no longer waited, because anyone who has grown used to waiting never entirely consents to that waiting coming to a close, it’s like having half the air you breathe snatched from you.