The Flanders Panel

The sense of realism was so intense that the painting effortlessly achieved the effect sought by the old Flemish masters: the integration of the spectator into the pictorial whole, persuading him that the space in which he stood was the same as that represented in the painting, as if the picture were a fragment of reality, or reality a fragment of the picture.

Like a Charles Stuart climbing to the scaffold almost as if he were doing so as a favour to the executioner, with his already rehearsed “Remember” on his lips and in the hope that he would be beheaded in profile, as he appeared on the coins struck in his image.

his bones would doubtless tremble with pleasure beneath his dusty gravestone in the crypt

Quite innocently, Julia imagined him naked, in the half-light of Cesar’s bedroom, beautiful and silent as a marble statue, his blond hair fallen over his face, with what Cesar termed, using a euphemism Julia believed he’d stolen from Cocteau, the golden sceptre, erect and ready to be tempered in the antrum amoris of his mature companion

You start off as a staunch supporter of white or red Burgundy: the best companion until you’re into your thirties. But then, though without renouncing Burgundy completely, it’s time to move on to Bordeaux: a wine for adults, serious and even-tempered. Only in your forties can you bring yourself to pay out a fortune for a crate of Petrus or Chateau d’Yquem.

“Would you really run away, without waiting to find out what it’s all about?”

“Of course I would. Remember, it was curiosity that killed the cat.”

“What about what you taught me when I was a child? Never leave a room without looking in all the drawers.”

“Ah, yes. But then people weren’t falling over in bathtubs.”

“Hypocrite. Deep down you’re dying to know what this is all about.”

Cesar looked reproachful.

“To say that I’m dying to do so, my dear, is in the worst possible taste, given the circumstances. Dying is exactly what I don’t want to do, now that I’m nearly an old man and have all these adorable young men to comfort me in my old age. And I don’t want you to die either.”