Did you not hear my lady

Go down the garden singing?

All this, Fiennes relates with lyrical restraint, avoiding mawkishness, creating instead a tribute that is part threnody, part celebration, and that provokes profound questions about the limits, and limitations, of free will, the extent to which our personalities are our own, the tension between the beauty and the vulnerability of the human heart.

Richard Fiennes died aged 41, during a night seizure.

‘We are rich in what we have lost’, his mother said after his death —

she wasn’t sure where the words had come from, but she kept repeating them, hearing his name in them: ‘We are rich …’

On finishing this book, we are rich in what we have gained.

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