Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself. - Martin Amis

after.” In the Preface to Volume Three he is less severe, and more persuasive: the Communist regime survived “not because there has not been any struggle against it from inside, not because people docilely surrendered to it, but because it is inhumanly strong, in a way as yet unimaginable to the West.” Among the elements of the state’s strength was its capacity to astonish, to dumbfound — and thus to delude. As Conquest says, “the reality of Stalin’s activities was often disbelieved because they seemed to be unbelievable . His whole style consisted of doing what had previously been thought morally or physically inconceivable.

He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.

His last words were spoken to a woman, to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are, but whether we can get them out. What Larkin said faintly was, "I'm going to the inevitable."