“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life. If that Griffin book had been Lynched Like Me, America might have looked […]

’I can’t think why you’re so inquisitive. It isn’t as if you’d even met Neville Forbes.’’No, but it’s like a kind of game,’ said Dulcie. It seemed – though she did not say this to Viola – so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people – to observe their […]

When we grow older we lack the fine courage of youth, and even an ordinary task like making a pullover for somebody we love or used to love seems too dangerous to be undertaken. Then Agatha might get to hear of it; that was something else to be considered. Her long, thin fingers might pick […]

’Perhaps you will see Piers’s lodgings,’ said Sybil, when I told her of the invitation, so much more respectable than my secret expedition would have been.’Lodgings’ sounder old-fashioned and sordid, and for a moment I felt as if it were wrong to be looking forward to the afternoon so much.’He asked me to have tea […]

It’s Tom’s thesis,’ said Deirdre in a reverent tone. ‘He’s just given me a copy to read. Look,’ she unwrapped the paper, ‘four hundred and ninety seven pages. How does he do it?’ ‘Well,’ said Catherine, ‘writers of fiction would tell you that one just goes on and on until one reaches page four hundred […]

Jane realized from Nicholas’s laugh and the uncomfortable silence that followed that she ought not to have spoken. ’I wonder whether a cup of tea would help us to see things in better perspective,’ she said quickly. ’I will just go and see Mrs Glaze about it,’ she added, hurrying from the room.’A cup of […]