“[He] looked exactly like Michael's idea of Don Quixote, 'the luminary and mirror of all knight-errantry', and for that gentle and melancholy knight Michael had always had the greatest affection. Indeed, he was almost his favourite character in literature . . . And he had been created by a man in prison . . . The thought of the great Cervantes, 'the maimed perfection', and of his sufferings so triumphantly endured, was one of the things that had helped to keep him sane many times, he imagined. He was young enough to believe that men go mad, that men die, more easily than in fact they do. He put the point where endurance is no longer possible at a reasonable distance along the way, not at that distant point where John could have told him that it does in fact exist.”