He placed her in a swirling gown within a blaze of gold rectangles, spirals and Egyptian symbols from which she looked out in nervous loveliness, the epitome of Vienna's Golden Age.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.
And a lot of times your clues are cold, but really we reconstruct it the same way a forensic scientist would go in and reconstruct a mystery surrounding a murder case.
All these I may sketch out at some future date, but none of them present such singular features as the strange train of circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.
Mr Assad's tightening grip over the most populous cities along a north-south axis in Syria's west has dimmed the prospects, always faint, of peace talks that were said to be in the offing in Geneva.