“Diamond Skinner had had no material possessions to his name and yet had been the happiest creature Lou had ever met. He and God would no doubt get along famously.”

“He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.”

“It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas.”

“I don't care much for diamonds,' Nicola had told him.'Have you ever been offered any?' he had asked, and he had been making fun of her, his face mocking.'Not that I can remember,' Nicola had admitted calmly.'And how would an offer be received?' he had asked, as though he knew the answer.'With a kick in the teeth,' Nicola had said, meeting his eye.”

“For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.”

“It would be difficult to say which had seen highest perfection in the other, or which had been the happiest: she, in receiving his declarations and proposals, or he in having them accepted.”