Dinah Brooke

Our relationship was one of intense passion, devotion, rage, hatred, anguish, desire, disgust, but it was all on my side. I don’t know what he felt about me. He read the book I wrote about his life, but made no comment. Whenever I made an emotional demand on him he retired rapidly into his madness; otherwise he was polite, humorous and amenable.

In one version of Italy, you find yourself. In another, to your horror, you find no self. Deprived of the context of home, thrust into the exaggerated pressures of vacation, you start to dissolve. In this novel of intense and often violent description, the more you pursue transformation, grasp at a different self, the more the possibility disappears from reach.

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She had never, she says, intended Lord Jim to be shocking. “I was just fascinated by the upbringing of murderers,” she tells me. “Miles Giffard’s nanny would lock him for hours at a time in the cupboard. His father had insisted he went to Rugby, but it was clear he wasn’t cut out for it. He was apparently a completely cut-off child – he didn’t connect properly with people.”

"I didn’t care, and I didn’t worry, but I was suspended, consistently and dramatically, in the mirage of the novel.”

“There’s a growing band of people digging through library stacks and second-hand bookshops in search of lost classics. I’m one of them.“