Anybody in any employment in Botswana was expected to engage somebody to help in the house. There was nothing extravagant about this; it was, in fact, a form of sharing: if you had a job, you had mone...
Angus smiled. So nothing’s certain, then? That’s right, said Big Lou. Except death and taxes, interjected Matthew. Isn’t that how the saying goes? They don’t pay taxes in Italy, observed Angus. I knew...
And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read?
All of us had hard choices, she thought; the greatest of us and the least of us, and we had to feel our way through them and accept that there would sometimes be regrets.
Addressing his friend, he draws attention to what she brings to the world through her therapeutic calling: We fall down in the dance, we make The old ridiculous mistake, But always there are such as y...
This woman, moved by some private sorrow as much as the words being spoken, cried almost silently, unobserved by others, apart from Mma Ramotswe, who stretched out her hand and laid it on her shoulder...
Pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so. - Precious Ramotswe
As she made her way back to the tiny white van she listened to her own breathing and felt her own heart thumping wildly. She had no idea where she had found the courage, but it had been there, like th...
You, I did once, years ago, do a little picture of Margaret Thatcher – bless her – a tiny little miniature. Then I pasted it onto a matchbox. Domenica looked puzzled. Oh? Angus smiled. Yes. Then I sto...
Was particularly hard for women now, when there were so many children left without
This was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness.
The fear of what might happen in the future is almost always worse than the future that eventually arrives.
Substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one
Steamships insult the dignity of distance,
Skyline reveals a city’s purpose and character. Oxford had its dreaming spires; Manhattan its glittering towers; Edinburgh its eccentric spikes.
People in Canada talk about feeling solitude? They sometimes call it a country of solitudes.
Of being linked with each other, we have every temptation to be selfish and unmoved by others and by their plight. Our towns, our cities, our places become no more than hotels, with all that lack of i...
Microbial resistance to antibiotics…
Love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults. You could love a murderer, and simply not believe that your lover would do so much as crush a tick, let alone kill somebod...
It was difficult to think what to do, and, as she often did in such circumstances, Mma Ramotswe decided that the best thing to do would be to go shopping.