“[Picasso] loved...women for the sexual, carnivorous impulses they aroused in him. Mixing blood and sperm, he exalted women in his paintings, imposed his violence on them, and sentenced them to death once he felt their mystery had been discharged and the sexual power they instilled in him had dulled... Women were his prey. He was the Minotaur. These were bloody, indecent bullfights from which he always emerged the dazzling victor.”

“He had a smug smile on his lips like he knew, even in his sleep, that women all around him were dying from love because he'd taken their hearts and hidden them where they'd never find them.”

“His life was cheap to him. Perhaps that's why he rode faster than any other, perhaps that was why he had walked into the house of Aquila without the quickening of a heartbeat: because at the heart of his courage was the fact that he really did not care if he died. Such courage is not true courage. True courage is when a man quakes with fear in the face of death, yet still risks his life for something he cares about. Ricardo Bruni did not know this yet, but he was to learn it soon.”

“He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.”

“With a feeling of despondency so intense that it was almost pleasurable, he got out his guitar.So this was to be his condition now.What was he but a fragment of broken churned-uphumanity washed up on this faraway shore? This was where his journey had brought him.... There mus be a song in this...”

“There were three of these women, separated by short intervals of pain, remorse, and despair. When he and the last one had their final quarrel - she threw the breadboard - he was nearly fifty-five, and he gave up on love, save the memory of it. Always his aim had been marriage. He had never entered what he considered to be an affair, something whose end was an understood condition of its beginning. But he had loved and wanted for the rest of his life women who took him in their arms, and even their hearts, but did not plan to keep him. He had known that about them, they had told him no lies about what they wanted, and he had persisted, keeping his faith: if he could not change their hearts, then love itself would.”

“It is remarkable that a fist-gnawingly dire England performance still has the power to shock, when in some ways this one had all the exquisite unpredictability of Norman Wisdom approaching a banana skin in the immediate vicinity of a swimming pool...The England shirt is the precise opposite of a superhero costume, turning men with extraordinary abilities into mild-mannered guys next door. Were Stephen Fry to pull it on, he would struggle to string a sentence together. Were Lucian Freud to slip it over his head he would turn his easel round to reveal a childlike scribble of a cat.”