Lorna > Recent Status Updates

"To return to Françoise, I never in my life experienced any humiliation without having seen beforehand on her face a store of condolences prepared and waiting " ( page 81)

How I love this book! It is even better the second time around - so perfect.

I'm finding this a bit frustrating because the pronunciation has no tones. I am simultaneously learning Mandarin Chinese so it's quite confusing. I wish the narrator/author had either mastered the correct names for places and people or perhaps they had found a bilingual reader. I have a background in Chinese Export Art History so I also feel I am not learning new from the Chinese perspective which is what I hoped for

How very British, to frame brewing your own beer and getting drunk as a precocious experiment on the indirect effects of fungi on the bodies of yourself and your friends. I imagine this was used in his well-received Cambridge interview.

"The fever" was (.) of a low, putrid, typhoid kind; brought on by miserable living, filthy neighbourhood, and great depression of mind and body. It is virulent, malignant, and highly infectious. But the poor are fatalists with regard to infection; and well for them it is so, for in their crowded dwellings no invalid can be isolated. Wilson asked Barton if he thought he should catch it, and was laughed at for his idea

This book is longer than War and Peace, I'm ten percent though and good old Clarissa is still writing letters trying to get out of an arranged marriage. I feel exhausted by her struggles but invested.

'The jests of the rich are ever successful'

I'm very much enjoying the description of his first Christmas in lockdown at the hotel. Great timing.