“Here she is at her kitchen table, fingering a jigsaw of thalidomide ginger, thinking about the arthritis in her hands.”

“Her laugh. The way she smoked before she gave up. Smoke trickling up her nostrils. Spokes of smoke when she spoke.”

“The jery, impeded walk of a man stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile, admitted, and stuck in a turnstile. He said it was rheumatoid arthritis. It looked as likely to be cancer of the prostrate metastatising to his hips.”

“In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.”

“When Julia was twenty-nine, her hair was already bar-coded. Now, at sixty-two, it was a solid helmet of bright pewter, level with her lean, brown jawbone.”

“In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.”

“He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.”