A Promise of Ankles (44 Scotland Street, #14)

by Alexander McCall Smith

Mothers loved; mothers plotted; mothers turned a blind eye to the most egregious defects in their sons. Daughters were different, and were often judged more severely by their mothers, but when it came to sons, mothers could forgive anything.

“Like those people who say au reservoir?”

Tofu says that reading’s old-fashioned and that he’s not going to waste his time learning how to do old-fashioned things. He said you might as well spend your time learning Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

“C. S. Lewis said, ‘When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’

was done out of kindness, that quality that eclipses all the other virtues, and that of itself is a perfectly adequate guide to the living of a good life.

“The interesting thing about Neanderthal art,” Dr Colquohoun said, “is that it exists at all. That’s what counts. It doesn’t matter that it consists of a few marks

on the wall, or decorated stalactites.

members of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals came into contact with one another. So there would have been children

who were a cross between the two, but as time went on and the Neanderthals became extinct, their genes would have been diluted further and further until modern man ended up with really rather few of them.”

two per cent of our human genome was made up of Neanderthal genes,