all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant.

Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity-old money-was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true.

We all have people in our lives we don't really choose as friends but with whom we're, well, lumbered, I suppose. Heart-sink friends.

But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, just to know that they're there.

but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken-sheep cloud-as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about...

But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, to know they are there.

That would have been taken out of the Munrowe voice two or three generations ago through being educated at schools that modelled themselves on the English public-school system, even if they were in...

As she spoke, Isabel found herself thinking of the power of words. A single word, a phrase, a sentence or two could have such extraordinary power; could end a world, break a heart or, as in this case,...

Martha simply did not know that virtually everything she said was inappropriate, and so there was no point in remonstrating with her.

It was pure privilege that determined where so many of us ended up in life, Isabel reflected; it was nothing to do with merit, it was privilege. Or, putting it another way, it was a matter of...

The physical world-the world of stone and brick-is indifferent to our suffering, to our dramas, she thought. Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to...

So one might cry for everything that was wrong with the world, for all the injustice and crudity and cruelty, for all the things that are stolen from people.

But only if youses shift yoursels and get in. He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland.

And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read?

How do you calibrate pain? asked Jamie. By cutting out the background pain of the world, answered Isabel. By cutting all that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that...

a word, as often happens, can be like a musical worm in the mind and invite repetition. But

Isabel smiled. She liked a conversation that went in odd directions; she liked the idea of playfulness in speech. People could be so depressingly literal. Jamie

Innocency: what a wonderful word, and different, in some indefinable way, from innocence. The difference, she thought, lay in the poetry.

Her eyes went to the shelves that stretched up to within a few inches of the ceiling. All four walls were covered; piles of books stood here and there, teetering, vulnerable, she judged, to the...

Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories, the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us.

good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant. The borderline between good fortune and disaster, between plenitude and paucity, between...

She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses...

Those important brain circuits, the ones that enabled most of us to avoid saying the wrong thing, were simply not there in Martha's case; or fired in the wrong order; or were short-circuiting. In...

Look at those clouds, said Jamie, gazing up at the sky. Look at them. Yes, said Isabel. They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them...