Just a note to say that I have taken six months off, but I haven’t given up. I have started a new novel, which may or may not come to anything.

Meantime I will go on blogging. Here is an observation on an aspect of the Russian character from Dostoyevsky’s The Insulted and Injured, which I’m reading at the moment:

“Why, it was there, in Paris, at Mme Joubert’s, we broke an English pier-glass.”

“What did you break?”

“A pier-glass. There was a looking-glass over the whole wall and Karp Vassilitch was that drunk that he began jabbering Russian to Mme Joubert. He stood by that pier-glass and leaned his elbow against it. And Joubert screamed at him in her own way, that the pier-glass cost seven hundred francs (that is, four hundred roubles), and that he’d break it! He grinned and looked at me. And I was sitting on a sofa opposite, and a beauty beside me, not a mug like this one here, but a stunner, that’s the only word for it. He cries out, ‘Stepan Terentyitch, hi, Stepan Terentyitch! We’ll go halves, shall we?’ And I said ‘Done!’ And then he banged his fist on the looking-glass, crash! The glass was all in splinters. Joubert squealed and went for him straight in the face: ‘What are you about, you ruffian?’ (In her own lingo, that is.) ‘Mme Joubert,’ says he, ‘here’s the price of it and don’t disperse my character.’ And on the spot he forked out six hundred and fifty francs. They haggled over the other fifty.”