Ian McEwan

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a 'secret mission' which brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one.

Sweet tooth

life of Sebastian Morel ‘a teacher of French’

Beatrix

He marvels at how irrelevant knowledge of rudimentary French is to the lives of these kids. 

He wanted to like them, but he was repelled by their ignorance and aggression and the way they jeered at and bullied any of their number who dared to show an interest in learning. In this way they kept themselves down.

 Nearly all of them will leave school as soon as they can and get unskilled jobs or get pregnant or make do with unemployment benefit. He wants to help them. Sometimes he pities them, sometimes he struggles to suppress his contempt.

…ultimately reality is social, it’s among others that we have to live and their judgements matter. Even, or especially, when we’re dead.

…and when he called after me, I increased my pace, fleeing not only the mess of his emotions but my own unreasonable guilt.

Sweet tooth quotes

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