Being one of the boys
‘Everything degenerates into habit – nausea, vanity, everything. For a year after I began drinking beer, I couldn’t stand the taste of it. All I was getting was the satisfaction of being one of the...
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Effect of high-altitude living
‘Extraordinarily rosy-cheeked, that girl.’ ‘Effect of high-altitude living,’ David said. ‘She comes from some tiny village up in the Italian Alps. You get that sort of thing above the fifteen hundred metre level. The small...
Brilliant skies
It was difficult to tell, looking back, how good a summer that had been. The records gave a statistical answer – at Kew, the century’s fourth best for dryness, the third best in hours of...
The winter begins
The light was poor, the bulbs glowing dully on the inadequate voltage. He ruffled the pages back awkwardly, peering at dates and headlines – back through the early days of scientific reports, dubious prognostications, tucked...
New US edition of ‘The World in Winter’
Today the consensus may be that we are heading towards a future of global overheating, but back in the 1960s, when the novel was first published, the talk was of a new Ice Age. In...
We’re a bad lot
‘We’re a bad lot,’ Father Edward said. ‘All of us, Jews or Christians. Christians have persecuted Jews, but they’ve persecuted each other just as much. It’s easier to persecute when you can recognize the ones...
The English are manure
Father Edward seemed more at ease here than I was myself. I thought at first that he might have been here before with Siegfried, but his frank, appraising gaze round the walls made that unlikely....
Finish the game
I said to Solly: ‘Where did you turn up from?’ He said: ‘Benno and I enjoy a game of chess together. He wins mostly, but sometimes I run him close.’ They had met, I found,...
Cut the necessities
I went up to Liverpool occasionally. I had to, since Dadda would not travel down to see me. His meanness, far from relaxing in the post-war years, grew steadily more pronounced. He would not spend...
‘Uppers’ and ‘Downers’
Poley left us all standing, his commissions frequently equalling, and even excelling, the combined total of the rest. He could win the confidence of a surprising variety of people. I was in the inner office...