MSF

'He intends to join Médecins sans Frontiéres. As I should have done at his age. Live all you can, as Henry James said.'

So says Dr Philip Hudson, over salmon, in Chapter 10 of Leaving Home. He is speaking of his son, whose sleeping form had such a powerful effect on Emma earlier in the novel.

I do not know the significance of any of this, and, gathering inscrutable congruences, I feel a little sub-Sebaldian, but here's Brookner's death notice in The Times from a year ago, in my mind at this anniversary time: