Chris Chapman’s Reviews > The Corner That Held Them > Status Update

No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor.

Four days later, when news came that a vagrant man called Jack Nonesuch, also Jack the Latiner, also Jackie Pad, had been seized in Waxelby and cast into jail, her satisfaction was terrible to witness. She guffawed, she cracked jokes, she scratched herself, she suggested having a Te Deum sung for the occasion: it was as if all her de Stapledon forebears, so pious over property, so ruthless over flesh and blood...