You might imagine that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and...
You know the best example of sincerity? The absolute gold standard? Who?Angus pointed to the door, outside which Cyril was waiting patiently. A dog. Have you ever met an insincere dog - a dog who hide...
You can hear the train in those lines; you can feel its rocking motion.
William closed his eyes in sheer ecstasy. Look, I know it’s absolutely no notice at all, but would you by any chance be free for dinner tonight? he asked. Again there was a silence. And then, once aga...
Well, that's the important thing, isn't it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.
We were the Bechuanaland Protectorate then, and the British ran our country, to protect us from the Boers (or that is what they said). There was a Commissioner down in Mafikeng, over the border into S...
We were all people—men and women—and you could never say that one group of people was less important than another.
We want to reorganise the world, and that makes our brains jump the gun –sometimes. You look at a newspaper headline, take in one word, and before you know it your brain says: yes, that’s what it says...
We should not be too surprised by the kindness of strangers, as it is always there.
We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we...
We must not eat dripping any more,’ warned Mma Makutsi from behind a healthy living magazine. ‘We must give up such things, Mma.’ This advice had been accompanied by a stern look in Mma Ramotswe’s dir...
We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives -- the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend...
We change the earth and our changes may only be temporary; yet the signs of what we have done may persist, as these mounds did.
We become the people we live with. Imperceptibly at first, but with a certain inevitability, we become the other.
We assume so much, don’t we? We assume that our children are going to be reasonable. We assume they’re going to see things as we see them. And then suddenly we discover that they can look at things qu...
We are all sent the dreams we yearn for, she thought; no matter how unhappy or fraught our waking world may be, we are sent dreams in which we can do the things the heart really wants us to do.
We all have Proustian moments, but don’t really know about it until we read Proust.
Unless we do something about the past, she thought, then it will weigh us down to such an extent that we simply cannot move. Is that what I want?
To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims to sp...
This was loyalty of a sort which was rare in an age of self-indulgence. It was an old-fashioned virtue of the type which her philosophical colleagues extolled but could never themselves match.