It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it…

If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.

We are bound by the secrets we share.

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness – seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly...

…what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there’s nothing left.

He had made a fairly unambiguous pass at her, as she was getting out of the cab. But event that had come to nothing. Sheba said that she had sensed something resentful about him, as...

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened...

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role – grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with...

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination – an inability to tolerate mistery.

But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.