I love to read, and I love to write, and reading a beautiful passage from literature is the most exquisite and elevated pleasure that I feel in my life.

I spend a lot of time copying passages that I admire into the giant documents of quotations that I’ve amassed over the years; I love to scroll through my collections and read quotations at random, just to have those words running through my mind.

Now, as a writer, if I do say so myself, I’m really good at endings. Often, I’ll be working on a book, and a moment will come when I’ll just know the ending, and it will flow through me. With my own books, I always think that the final paragraphs are the finest part. (Particularly Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill.)

So I pay a lot of attention to books’ endings.

Here is one of my favorite endings, one that I added in its entirety to my quotations collection and one that I’ve read and re-read many times. It’s the ending of Lytton Strachey’s extraordinary biography Queen Victoria. I love the work of English writer and critic Lytton Strachey, and Queen Victoria is one of my favorites. The entire book is quite short (especially considering Queen Victoria’s long and remarkable reign) and so, so, so good.

I can’t resist reading the ending, about Queen Victoria’s death, because I love it so much. Strachey imagines Victoria’s fading mind retracing the vanished visions of her long history—passing back through decades of memories in a cascade that captures both the end of a life and the end of an era.

By the end of the year the last remains of her ebbing strength had almost deserted her; and through the early days of the opening century it was clear that her dwindling forces were only kept together by an effort of will. On January 14, she had at Osborne an hour’s interview with Lord Roberts, who had returned victorious from South Africa a few days before. She inquired with acute anxiety into all the details of the war; she appeared to sustain the exertion successfully; but, when the audience was over, there was a collapse. On the following day her medical attendants recognised that her state was hopeless; and yet, for two days more, the indomitable spirit fought on; for two days more she discharged the duties of a Queen of England. But after that there was an end of working; and then, and not till then, did the last optimism of those about her break down. The brain was failing, and life was gently slipping away. Her family gathered round her; for a little more she lingered, speechless and apparently insensible; and, on January 22, 1901, she died.

When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been made public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place. The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them. She had become an indissoluble part of their whole scheme of things, and that they were about to lose her appeared a scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinking—to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history—passing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories—to the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield—to Lord Palmerston’s queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert’s face under the green lamp, and Albert’s first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees, and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old King’s turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold’s soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother’s feathers sweeping down towards her, and a great old repeater-watch of her father’s in its tortoise-shell case, and a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at Kensington.