Margaret Leigh

If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know. I remember telling this to someone once. I can’t remember who it was, but she real

Regan is trying to part Kay’s nest of hair, to get a better look at his scalp. ‘Goodness me,’ she says, smiling fondly. ‘You look like you’ve been in the wars.’ ‘Most of them, yeah,’ says Kay.

‘We are solving a mystery,’ said James, examining Grace with pleasure, and becoming extraordinarily handsome. ‘Would you like to see?’

Wine was certainly known among the elites, as it had been from Roman times, although as an imported commodity it was both expensive and rare. In the richest graves there are delicate glasses brought in (or looted) from Frankia and elsewhere on the Continent. Sometimes they have been painstakingly repaired with metal clips, indicating how valued the

‘How are you?’ he asked. We were sitting in a ‘break-out’ area, in deep nourishing sofas that are intended to cradle fragile personalities. People come here to make difficult phone calls, and sometimes to get fired. ‘I’m well, thanks.’ ‘But how are you really?’ he said, looking at me so intently that I found tears pricking my eyes. I wondered if I

what divides them from us is mainly their discretion. In Iceland today, belief in the Hidden People just about survives (though to a much lesser degree than tourist brochures would have you think) as part of a deeper and more widespread respect for the spiritual currency of the past in relation to a landscape that is far from inert.

four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4) knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’.

We’ll go back to work just after Miss Catharine puts the cornflowers in her hair. This is one of our favorite moments in the movie, when the octogenarian gentlewoman Miss C is given piles of cornflowers by George and his kind-eyed father, who says, “There are no jewels more becoming a lady. I like to see them in your hair.” And so father and son de

To the casual observer, gazing down from the top of the Tower perhaps, or from a penthouse apartment in one of the expensive blocks that have sprung up in recent years, this might be Las Vegas. If that casual observer really squinted. And had never been to Las Vegas.

The question still unsettles me when I later drive into town to pick up supplies. Who is asking for directions to my farm? The query could be perfectly innocent, asked by someone in search of the previous owner, unaware that the woman passed away three years ago at age eighty-eight. She was, by all accounts, legendary for her sharp wit and her bad