"Instead it seemed to Vernon that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all. When he reached, in solitude, for a thought, there was no one there to think it. His chair was empty; he was finely dissolved throughout the building, from the city desk on the sixth floor, where he was about to intervene to prevent the sacking of a long-serving subeditor who could not spell, to the basement, where parking allocations had brought senior staff to open war and an assistant editor to the brink of resignation. Vernon's chair was empty because he was in Jerusalem, the House of Commons, Cape Town, and Manlia, globally disseminated like dust; he was on TV and radio, at dinner with some bishops, giving a speech to the oil industry or...