But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.