Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.