Sublime

Tom had read aloud a Seamus Heaney poem, ‘Blackberry Picking’, and was talking about landscape as a source of allegory, as well as political and social commentary. The challenge was to find fresh ways to describe nature, he said, to see its potential for secrets, for clues.

He’d lost perhaps half an inch in height, and gained perhaps an inch in breadth; but generally speaking the years had glanced off him without damage, and he was as unaltered as Bethesda’s pews.

some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignifican

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned