Q. I have some fairly new friends who very generously invited me to stay with them in Turkey. They told me who would be coming and I was slightly dreading meeting up again with one man I haven’t seen since we were much younger. He was always patronising and a bit misogynistic, and – as I was to discover – is even more insufferable now he has become successful. Everyone was lying by the pool and he asked me what I was reading. When I showed him – a fairly undemanding classic novel – his comment was: ‘Gosh, well done!’ I was infuriated but the only responses I could think of would have caused bad vibes within the very relaxed house party. So I said nothing. How could I have upbraided him without others thinking that I was uncivilised?
– S.D., Amersham, Bucks
A.
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