Chance, me too. Excellent list.

The Blue Flower is for me one of the greatest novels of the century. There are only nine novels - it’s terrible when you get to the end of them.

I have been looking at this thread and Michele, you are the first contributor I might have a drink with.

ANYWAY Bleak House Lessico Famigliare (Ginzburg) and Moominland Midwinter or The Magic Mountain, one of the two.

Come and have lunch soon and we’ll reassure each other that we’re not mental xxxx

Oh, I adored that film when I was a child, and it turned out to be just as good as I remembered.

The Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen are only 30 minutes away. The opera’s great, one of the best orchestras in Europe.

I loved H H so much…I think maybe he was not so much ahead of his time as a wonderful hangover from 1970s Hollywood…?

I understand. You were among the thirty or forty Jewish friends that I thought of immediately. All our love.

Wotcher sossage

I am not (as you must know) a person of abstract principles. And when something like this happens I think “How could you? How could you?”

And not, I’m afraid , “But what about…?”

My thoughts and love go out to you and everyone you know touched or worse by this. Xxx

Butting in like a twerp. Yeah, Sam’s right, it’s the loss of the real-time observer of events that’s so bad. Twitter just didn’t narrate the events in Israel as it has momentous events in the past. This place seems a bit dull at the mo but who knows?

I celebrate and respect your decency and truth with all the humility I can muster. And then I think “What does the Israeli government want to achieve?” And then “What does Hamas want to achieve?” And the answer to the second, which is “Kill all Jews” makes me think there’s no equivalence here.