It's been a while. Remember when doing this was a thing?
I loved this book, especially the little capsule capturing of people
"ON A DECEMBER MORNING of the late 1960s, I was sitting by the windows of the Gran Caffè in the piazzetta of Capri, doing the crossword in The Times. The weather was wet, as it had been for days, and the looming rock face of the Monte Solaro dark with rain. High seas, and some consequent suspension of the Naples ferry, had interrupted deliveries from the mainland; and the newspaper freshly arrived from London was several days old. In the café, the few other tables were unoccupied. An occasional waterlogged Caprese—workman or shopkeeper—came to take coffee at the counter. There was steam from wet wool and espresso; a clink and clatter of small cups and spoons; an exchange of words in dialect. It was near noon. Two tall figures under umbrellas appeared in the empty square and loped across to the café: a pair of Englishmen wearing raincoats, and one—the elder—with a black beret. The man with the beret was Graham Greene. I recognised him—as one would; and also because I had seen him in the past on Capri, at the restaurant Gemma near the piazza, where he dined at a corner table with his companion, and great love of the postwar decade, Catherine Walston. That was in the late 1950s, when I used to visit Naples and Capri from Siena, where I then spent part of the year. One knew that Greene had a house in the town of Anacapri, in the upper portion of the island, which he had visited faithfully if sporadically for many years."
"His only “exercise” was walking—and he had walked, in his time, across countries and continents—but his body had the loose agility that derives from a lifelong sense of being thin, lanky, alert, and tall."
"(Flaubert, in a letter of 1846, also felt that “to be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”)"
"Graham discovered that Francis and I had met through Muriel Spark: “I don’t know her but I admire her writing.” He did not say that—as I knew from Muriel—he had regularly and privately sent money to help her survive her lean first years of writing fiction, the cheques arriving each month with, in Muriel’s words, “a few bottles of red wine to take the edge off cold charity.” Greene did similar good by stealth, over many years, for other needy writers—among them the Indian novelist R. K. Narayan, to whom he gave inestimable material and professional help. One gradually learned, through chance testimony, of financial and practical aid to friends down on their luck, and to charitable concerns where he felt interest and saw authenticity."
"A squat, categorical figure, formless in winter bundling, the Dottoressa had the rugged, russet complexion of northerners long weathered in the hot south, prominent paleolithic teeth, and memorably pale blue eyes."
"For even his enormous tolerance had certain limits. He loved life too well to have patience with puritans or fanatics. He was a gentleman and he disliked a boor."
"Out of a gothic north, the pallid children of a potato, beer-or-whisky guilt culture..."
