I do not know how many afternoons I lay on my bed listening to a litany of tennis noises from where my two brothers played on the court a little to the right below my window. Sometimes, to tell me it was time to get up, my elder brother Richard would send a tennis ball […]

Ẹniọlá shrugged; he was grateful for the food he had just eaten. The quantity of food available for dinner varied from day to day because his parents were still trying to pay off the landlord. In spite of his mother’s pleas, Ẹniọlá now refused to go begging again since none of the money would go […]

Maurice Hearn sits alone in the café bar at the ferry terminal. He turns the remains of a third brandy in its glass. You keep going any way you can. The motions of the alcohol are familiar: the easy warming, the calm sustain, and now the slow grading into remorse. A melancholy hour falleth. As […]

What Slavoj said was this: People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have […]

I used to spend my coffee-break and my tea-time with Connie, sometimes in her office, sometimes in mine. My job was to collect from her those few new manuscripts that had a faint possibility of being shaped into a book for publication, or whose authors should perhaps be nurtured. It was a very tentative affair, […]

From the lower-floor dormitories the people in the street looked larger, and the paths of the park were visible. All the nice people were poor, and few were nicer, as nice people come, than these girls at Kensington who glanced out of the windows in the early mornings to see what the day looked like, […]

These girls formed the Brodie set. That was what they had been called even before the headmistress had given them the name, in scorn, when they had moved from the Junior to the Senior school at the age of twelve. At that time they had been immediately recognisable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed […]