The inaugural issue of White Tower, Ambrose Silk’s new literary review, is suspected of being the work of a fifth column, and Ambrose is forced to flee to Ireland in disguise. Here we have a description of the ideal circumstances for an expatriate writer, inverted:

Here Ambrose settled, in the only bedroom whose windows were unbroken. Here he intended to write a book, to take up again the broken fragments of his artistic life. He spread foolscap paper on the dining-room table; and the soft, moist air settled on it and permeated it so that when, on the third day, he sat down to make a start, the ink spread and the lines ran together, leaving what might have been a brush stroke of indigo paint where there should have been a sentence of prose. Ambrose laid down the pen, and because the floor sloped where the house had settled, it rolled down the table, and down the floor-boards and under the mahogany sideboard, and lay there among the napkin rings and small coins and corks and the sweepings of half a century. And Ambrose wandered out into the mist and the twilight, stepping soundlessly on the soft, green turf.

— from Put Out More Flags (Evelyn Waugh)