In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. - Salman Rushdie

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason — the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity” — and we also contain the antidote to that disease — courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.