Junithys’s Reviews > The Secret History > Status Update

"I have fought against a — tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly—basically to falsify him—to make it seem something
more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And I know I said earlier that he was perfect, but he wasn’t perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because."

*To a friend [George Orwell] wrote: “Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his “Asiatic serenity’ is, I think, a mask for great coldness.
The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror. Acton’’—