If somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybo… - Nadine Gordimer

Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations - the way people are going to live, the way they think, further. She had no illusions about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen. Yet there’s purpose in the attempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? - even if it is renamed empowerment.

The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea.

My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer.