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Most of all, he wanted so much to be a good king – attempting to please everyone all the time – that he inevitably displeased some.

Such a mercurial ruler could hardly be an inspiration to his people. Wise men do not follow leaders whom they suspect might later reproach them for their loyalty.

The king was purposefully creating the maximum amount of fear. In Richard’s mind, the fear of his subjects equated to his own sense of power.

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.

Nikolasha and Rosa had died for the romantic delusion: totalitarian love as reckless melodrama and desperate possession, an orchestra of trumpets and thunderbolts. Now he saw clearly that the real poetry of love was a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details.

He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography.

What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.

Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have.

‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her.

‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present.’

“No, literature isn’t eternal,” he cried. “It’s a thing of the moment. Even if you made books with pages of steel and diamond letters, they would some day crash into the sun and melt, together with our planet. Nothing is eternal, least of all in art. It doesn’t matter how long an author’s work continues to glimmer after his death. What matters is how brightly it burns while he’s still alive.”

But his illness never attained the merciful degree of severity that would have entitled him to a spell in a lunatic asylum and absolve him from further work. It wasn’t quite severe enough for a lunatic; only for a writer.