anthony trollope
Your happiness is put on hold when it transpires your fiancé failed to correctly cash a cheque. This lasts for 130 chapters. Everyone else is ordained.
evelyn waugh
The spectre of God’s grace haunts your attempts to hang out with people posher than yourself.
henry james
You declined an invitation, not wishing, to wit, for it to be understood that you might have deliberately allowed yourself to be put at a disadvantage. Now your ruin is certain.
graham greene
Your only desire is to preserve an inconceivably small piece of your dignity. You are denied this, because of a prior engagement with the British Foreign Office. This novel is called The Way of the Thing.
w shakespeare (i)
You become King. This turns out to have been a very big mistake.
samuel richardson
‘Dearest Mama, An alluring yet unvirtuous rake has designs on my Innocence and has placed me in a sack to be transported to Covent Garden. Fortunately the sack is so designed as to allow the writing of several letters.’
david foster wallace
You suffer from an unbearably acute and inexpressible form of psychic pain and anxiety, the very inexpressibility of which is in and of itself a significant constituent part of this pain. Your name is Quagmire Gesamtkunstwerk.
marcel proust
The only straight person in Paris has a series of very long lunches.
