Caledonian Road

“They never got bored with each other, he felt, because they never assumed the other wasn’t an individual.”

“He mustn’t overreact to their hatred of small talk and of white men who think they rule the world. But being right, to them, was like having a passport, Campbell said to himself. You can’t get anywhere without it. Unless you’re right, you don’t belong anywhere and all borders are closed.”

“You’re like an artist yourself,’ she said. ‘Artists are always looking for new bits of themselves they can sell.”

“We participate in the systems that oppress people, we thrive on them, and we think that by going on festive marches and tweeting slogans to our like-minded friends we are somehow cleansed. Welcome to the orgy of white contrition.”

“You know the Russians paid for Brexit, right?”

“Just because you live your life doesn’t mean you understand it,’ he”

“You can’t live your life being celebrated for beautifully preaching what you will never practise, and this was the certainty that had begun Campbell’s trouble. He’d always written rather blithely about goodness, truth and harmony, but hadn’t he, in actual fact, travelled far from these things, and had he any choice now but to find his way back?”

“Something in his life was off, and he felt that he was steering gradually towards a precipice”

“If you were Zemi, you were four times more likely to die; and if you were Zemi, the best treatment came more slowly, and you had known it all your life. To the politicians who flout their own rules, to the Establishment that backs them up, Milo swore revenge. To the liberals who think they do well by managing language, giving up nothing while they spell out the difference between one grain of sand and another, he swore exposure. Milo understood as the year went on that nothing for him could ever be the same. Society was revealed, and he would show these people, provide for his family, and then disappear.”

“Liberals are always interested in money. They care about it and they care about what it brings, but they reserve the right to disdain that impulse in other people.”

“He wants to be the person coming into the room. He wants to be the person paying for everything and leaving first.”

“Social mobility is a fantasy upheld by guilty rich people.”

“These Russian gangsters have been at it for years.’ ‘They’re not all like that.’ ‘Of course not.’ She was packing up her things. ‘You know the Russians paid for Brexit, right? It was their money that made the Tories believe London was invincible.”

“The house of cards inside us becomes shaky when we realise, one day, that we breathe no differently from our parents, and are nervous like them to hold the world steady.”

“Antonia Byre was playing with the thought that a sort of forgiveness lies at the core of every wife’s heart, and every widow’s too.”

“He had reached the high point of his expertise. In his mind, it was a sort of miracle, the way all the houses he’d discovered in the tangled digital woods, with their long corridors and their hidden doors, had finally given up their keys. And how, like tonight, he could simultaneously open the locks to reveal the rooms inside. A year ago he couldn’t have done it. Determination had brought him here, and luck. Hackers’ years are like dog years, and he was an old man now in his T-shirt and shorts.”

“He didn’t like the countryside half as much as she did, but he studied it, the flora and fauna, because studying had always made something noble of his disorientation.”

“Self-help is not writing, it’s healing. Or publicity.”

“El idealismo giraba a su alrededor como una vieja canción. Una bobada, en realidad. Sabía que no podían vencer a todos, pero podían evitar ser como ellos, y tal vez eso bas­taba. Y si fracasaban en lo que querían hacer y ser, le decía Milo, vivirían con su fracaso y no con el de los demás, y, en cierto modo, eso ya era una mejora.”

“It’s like it had never occurred to him that being a father, being her father, wasn’t the most wonderful privilege a person could have.”

“And now, in the North of England, just as in Kansas or Illinois, people vote against their own interests, because they detest a culture that sees them as needy, they hate the caring elites who like to tell them what is good for them. In the modern world, William told himself, people don’t mind being exploited so long as they can choose it themselves.”

“Es lo que le pasa a la mayoría de los liberales, se dijo Wil­liam, por eso son incapaces de gestionar el poder, por eso sus par­tidos políticos son un desastre: no comprenden su verdadera natu­raleza, sus verdaderas aspiraciones. ¡La certeza, el sentimiento, la certeza y el sentimiento, la certeza y el sentimiento, la certeza, natu­raleza, sus verdaderas aspiraciones! Los supera. Por eso se concentran tanto en los sentimientos y en hacerse los dolidos, en ponerles nombres a las co­sas, en la corrección, porque no tienen estómago para la desigual­dad de la que dependen. Y ahora, en el norte de Inglaterra, igual que en Kansas o en Illinois, la gente vota en contra de sus propios intereses, porque detesta la cultura, que los ve como necesitados, odia a las élites solidarias, que pretenden decirles qué es lo que les conviene. En el mundo moderno —se dijo William, a la gente no le importa que la exploten, siempre que pueda elegirlo por sí misma.”

“She recalled that he’d once found a book of cloakroom tickets in the bin cupboard under the Rosemount Flats and started selling them for two pence each in the school playground, saying that David Bowie was going to give a concert at Alexandra Parade Primary School.”