The Children of Men

by P.D. James

If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

“I don’t think I trust Manning.

couldn’t then say what for nearly forty years I have known to be true. I don’t want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

I suppose, in old age, there is advantage in retreating into a world of one’s own, but not if the place one finds is hell.

But hell as described by Rosie is less a place of torment than the equivalent of an ill-conducted and uncomfortable fourth-rate hotel where incompatible guests are forced to endure each other’s company for eternity and do their own washing-up with inadequate facilities although, presumably, with no lack of boiling water.

Remember what happened in Europe in the 1990s? People became tired of invading hordes, from countries with just as many natural advantages as this, who had allowed themselves to be misgoverned for decades through their own cowardice, indolence and stupidity and who expected to take over and exploit the benefits which had been won over centuries by intelligence, industry and courage, while incidentally perverting and destroying the civilization of which they were so anxious to become part.”