Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

I mean, you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?

There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

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.

I don't know whether it's age or maturity, but I certainly find myself committed more and more to the looser forms of Western democracy at any price.