Formal business situations are likely to be the least revealing because these are the times when all of us are most likely to have our ‘game faces' on.

Secrets are dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.

Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.

Without pride, man becomes a parasite – and there are already too many parasites.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

Shame comes in different doses.

In any career, there is a moment when you are no longer need to be pushed up from below, but rather pulled up from above. Know when that moment comes and adjust your strategy accordingly.

It’s late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.

To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

Only men with intelligence, confidence and absolutely no empathy at all can progress upstairs.