Andrews UK

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.

—Aristotle: Politics

You don’t stop loving people because aren’t nice and you can’t stop loyalty if it happens to be in your blood.

don’t stop loving people because aren’t nice and you can’t stop loyalty if it happens to be in your blood.

Frost and Fire

I

During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him a thousand pulses each minute. He grew, steadily.

Into his mouth his mother with feverish hands put the food. The nightmare of living was begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent tenor. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.

There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a man loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A man with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. The man was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.

If you’re not from Great Britain or Ireland, sadly you’ll never be admitted to Hogwarts. It is exclusively for children from these two countries

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.

He deals in litter and detritus; his judgement is not always sound and he knows the symptoms of loneliness like the noise of his own breath.

you can’t stop loyalty if it happens to be in your blood.

What distinguishes this book and those that follow and what makes them classics of a kind is this marvellous quality of compassion and the celebration of all that is heroic in the corrupted ordinary. Devlin and his author love and forgive their clients and their friends even when they hate them, and that is the lot of the humane man. You don’t stop loving people because aren’t nice and you can’t stop loyalty if it happens to be in your blood.