I love the stories, the plots – variations on a few themes, their scope narrowing as time went on. The sensitive and intelligent and weak are preyed upon by the unintelligent and strong; profoundly private women elect, for their own purposes, to build their lives around the absent men who hardly know them. The themes have an exotic flavour these days, they smell of an irretrievable past. But the stories only come into their being through Brookner’s distinctive sentences, ripely substantial, stamped unapologetically with the writer’s personality, commenting and discriminating, digressing and summarising – and darkly funny. Hartmann “considered his life’s work to lie in the perfecting of simple pleasures, mainly of a physical or domestic nature … The idea of God, for example, he rejected as derogating from his own serene existence.” [Read More]