And Then There Was No One

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‘My only pyjama hat! You should have taken the other turn to the lunatic asylum.’

‘If I have made mistake, the apologize is terrific. But if this is not the lunatic asylum what are you doing here, my esteemed friend?’

FRANK RICHARDS, Billy Bunter’s Double

As I peered, stripped naked and traversed by opaline rays, into another, far deeper mirror, I saw the whole vista of my Russian books and was satisfied and even thrilled by what I saw: Tamara, my first novel (1925): a girl at sunrise in the mist of an orchard. A grandmaster betrayed in Pawn Takes Queen. Plenilune, a moonburst of verse. Camera Lucida, the spy’s mocking eye among the meek blind. The Red Top Hat of decapitation in a country of total injustice. And my best in the series: young poet writes prose on a Dare.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Look at the Harlequins!

Note: Confronted with the eternally vexed question of footnotes versus endnotes, I have opted for the former. If footnotes resemble the subtitles of a foreign-language film, the repeated recourse to endnotes may be compared to obliging the spectator of that film to dash out of the auditorium every ten minutes to consult a bilingual phrase-book. Neither is entirely satisfactory, but I know which, as a reader, I prefer. G. A.

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