Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.

America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

He has the gift of quiet.