Capturing with a miniaturist's brush the unfolding demands of family, fortune, personal ambition, ideology, and desire, A Terrible Country is a compelling novel about ageing, radical politics, Russia at a crossroads, and the difficulty - or impossibility - of actually changing one's life.
Moss's bottling-up of his sexual desires, "the terrible pauses before nude Apollos in museums," represents the most acute betrayal, but it exists within a society steeped in deceit.
We're both oldest kids and have that terrible desire to organise and sort out.
I had a terrible desire to set fire to his whole archive and I think: Oh God, is this ever going to go away?
In a game of relentless speed but precious little accuracy, they had settled first and looked comfortable until Paterson's strength and desire and Hibs' terrible inability to see danger coming from three paces did them in.
I have such terrible desires.
It's a gripping read: across the pages, his sanity slowly unravels and he struggles with his faith, his all too earthly desires, and a terrible secret that Sedgwick says is "possibly the most gruesome thing I've ever put in a book".
Think of Jerry Sandusky, the shock of whose crimes had more to with the aggressive persistence he brought to satisfying his terrible desires than with any sense that he was motivated primarily by malevolence; Jeffrey Toobin was not alone in calling him "an evil, evil man".
"It is terrible to desire and not possess, and terrible to possess and not desire," says Yeats; and Queen Victoria rants against the Women's Rights "on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety".
But the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios — the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about — was still startling.
