Brooknerianism - a handy guide

Romanticism, Anita Brookner tells us, isn't just a mode. It literally eats into every life. Brooknerianism is not quite at that level, but we can all do more to live up to Brookner's high standards.

So here it is - to cut out and keep, your guide to the Brooknerian life.

• Learn the importance of style - one day you may need to get by on it alone.
• Learn the value of form - form, which is probably going to save us all.
• Cherish art, though it does not love you and cannot console you.
• Get to know London and Paris, but also the more esoteric corners of Brooknerland. Abroad in provincial cities, expect to be suitably indolent and homesick.
• Be stealthy - like Jane in A Family Romance, at her little pavement table, deep in France, stealthily beginning to write.
• Brush up your languages. Brooknerians are not fazed by long passages of untranslated French.
• Cultivate a middle-aged persona, even years afterwards. You might say, for example, that you're 46, and have been for some time past.
• Get your hair cut regularly, iron your shirts, wear scent or aftershave, and invest in some V-neck cashmere jumpers.
• Read the classics - Trollope for decent feelings, James for moral scruple, Dickens for indignation, and Proust for pleasure.
• Also read, surprising everyone, the Great White Males of twentieth-century American fiction.
• Smoke, if you must - accepting the disapproval of others, while having no real plans to ditch the habit.
• Be a regular at various grand hotels in Mitteleuropa. In Baden-Baden, hunker close to the Lichtentalerallee.
• Say 'an' hotel, never 'a' hotel.
• Go to bed de bonne heure. Brooknerians are not suited to the night.
• Be accountable in your dealings with friends and lovers.
• Cherish eighteenth-century clear-sightedness, but accept the discontents of your ruined Romantic nineteenth-century inheritance.
• Nevertheless, prize boldness, fearlessness.
• Attend parties, but leave early. Keep yourself rare.
• Maintain a careful, even a valetudinarian watch on your health, but don't always seek professional help. Trust to unconscious processes, be a devotee of Freud.
• Speak with care and precision. Put others on their mettle.
• Last of all, drink tisanes, with a little honey, to give an illusion of well-being.