Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his book about his early years in Paris, which seemed to be on every counter and table in Waterstone's Piccadilly branch last week.

We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescape. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Cafe des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.

That is on the opening page of the stories in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his book about his early years in Paris, which seemed to be on every counter and table in Waterstone's Piccadilly branch last week.

I discovered Hemingway very late. And when I did I nearly gave up writing anything in English again except for business writing because that has to be bad and clumsy to be effective. I thought, based on rumour and hearsay, that Hemingway was merely a stylist. He isn't: he is simply one of the best experimental writers of English there has ever been. Those two sentences pick out maybe a dozen images from a winter evening and knit them together like one smooth Vincente Minelli crane shot.

Masterly.