The Pleasure of Seeing Others Brought Down “If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others,” La Rochefoucauld writes in one of his maxims. As so often with him, the sting is hidden in a word that is easy to pass over. In this case, that word…

I don’t know whether someone told me this or I read it somewhere, but tonight one of those wise-sounding phrases has been spinning around in my head – the kind of thing you’d proudly serve up at a dinner table. It goes like this: “Nothing ages you faster than fulfilled dreams.”…

“No,” said the Girl, and there was a familiar note in her voice. Painfully familiar. “No parking!” “Keep off the grass!” “Occupied!” “Oh, come on,” thought the Boy – who by now wasn’t really a boy anymore, but a short-cropped, greying little man. “It was ‘no’ the other day, too,…

In a house filled with broken toys and forgotten dreams, nine-year-old Anne — called Firecurl for the wild red hair she cannot tame — stumbles into a game far older, and far more dangerous, than it first appears. When a strange model landscape bewitches her and a storm of anger…