The Private Life of Spies and The Exquisite Art of Getting Even: Stories of Espionage and Revenge

by Alexander McCall Smith

Perhaps, he thought, that is what we all do in one way or another: create families for ourselves as we go through life.

Identities are interesting, aren’t they? We can pick the one we feel best expresses something within us. You can be Catholic, or Jewish, or have a particular sexual identity or whatever while obviously being something else as well. And you can create an identity for yourself that can then

become the real you.

But the truth of the matter is that we are just as conformist as they were. We delude ourselves if we think we are free—all that has happened is that the nature of the constraints has changed—the diktats are different, and issued by a different set of diktat-issuers. We have a hegemony of attitudes just as they did in the 1920s and ’30s.

“Sometimes I wonder where contemporary proponents of human rights think their values came from. They can be very dismissive of us—of the Christian tradition—but has it occurred to them that the values they are so attached to are a direct result of Christianity’s stressing of dignity and love?

many people today are relativists—which means that they seriously think it’s impossible to distinguish between values. They take the view there’s no such thing as truth—even scientific truth.”

you could pretend to believe in things that you knew were unlikely to be true but that you knew offered hope in a damaged and unhappy world.

am reminded of the story of the Spanish conquistador who, on his death bed, is asked by his confessor whether he has forgiven his enemies. “Enemies?” he replies. “I have no enemies, Father. I have killed them all.”

Judging the past by the standards of the present is facile.

What it does mean, though, is that we may have to recognise that the perpetrators of acts of cruelty or injustice may not have grasped the objective wrongness of their acts.

Unfortunately, we live in days when we are particularly keen to find somebody to blame for any misfortune that occurs. We want scapegoats, even if they are innocent.

Forgiveness heals; it allows us to unclutter our lives with the business of the past; it makes room for human flourishing. It also facilitates the happy ending, which is what we want in most, if not all, the books we read, and in life too.