“Reading a single good novel at a leisurely pace can be a pleasurable experience, but your work as judge involves consuming a non-optional slew of novels of dubious quality at breakneck speed, so it’s a very different experience altogether. But it is also stimulating, intense, and enriching, as you realise particularly when the curtain of the experience begins to fall.”

“When my mother asked me to spend the summer in her brothers’ house in the south, I employed every sophistry of my sixteen years—an age when only a mother pays attention to your budding philosophy of life—to explain to her that life forces surge northward, that the south, from which she and my father came, was becoming obsolete, that Ibn Khaldun (who had inspired this claim) was a great man, that the money could be better spent on a vacation, and that her brothers were actually not that nice.”