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they worked with the seriousness of creators – and destruction after all is a form of creation.
He protested with the fury of the child he had never been, ‘It isn’t fair.’
Where one man would treasure a single Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Mr Ferraro bought wholesale – he had six Renoirs, four Degas, five Cézannes. He never tired of their presence, they represented a substantial saving in death-duties.
Death doesn’t change comedy to tragedy, and if that last gesture was one of affection, I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being’s capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.
Nobody drank the toast of the King more sincerely than Mr Chalfont so long as someone else was standing the drink,
I imagined it was the same sort of dying this time, the sort a man gets over.
