He made up his mind quickly.

He made up his mind quickly. He unfastened a painter, leaned over the rail and tied it to the life-raft. Jakobson changed course for Ystad, and Holmgren secured the line when the dinghy was about 10 metres behind the boat and free of its wake.
When the Swedish coast came into sight, Holmgren cut the rope and the life-raft with the two dead men inside disappeared far behind. Jajobson changed course to the east, and a few hours later they chugged into the harbour at Brantevik. Jakobson collected his pay, got into his Volvo and drove off towards Svarte.
The harbour was deserted. Holmgren locked the wheelhouse and spread a tarpaulin over the cargo hatch, He checked the hawsers slowly and methodically. Then he picked up the bag containing the money, walked over to his old Ford, and coaxed the reluctant engine to life.
On the spur of the moment, he turned right and stopped at one of the phone boxes opposite the bookshop in the square. He rehearsed what he was going to say carefully. Then he dialled 999 and asked for the police. As he waited for them to answer, he watched the snow begin to fall again through de dirty glass of the phone box
From the book ‘The dogs of Riga’ By Henning Mankell

At Rome we lived in the big house

At Rome we lived in the big house which had belonged to my grandfather and which he had left in his will to my grandmother. It was on the Palatine Hill, close to Augustus’s palace and the temple of Apollo built by Augustus, where the library was. The Palatine Hill looked down on the Market Place. Under the steepest part of the cliff was the temple of the Twin Gods, Castor and Pollux. (This was the old temple, built of timber and sods, which sixteen years later Tiberius replaced, at his own expense, with a magnificent marble structure, the interior painted and gilded and furnished as sumptuously as a rich noblewoman’s boudoir . My grandmother Livia made him do this to please Augustus, I may say. Tiberius was not religious-minded and very stingy with money.) It was healthier on that hill than down in the hollow by the river; most of the houses there belonged to senators. I was a very sickly child – a very battleground of diseases, ‘ the doctors said – and perhaps only lived because the diseases could not agree as to which as to which should have the honour of carrying me off. To begin with, I was born prematurely, at only seven months, and then my fuster-nurse’s milk disagreed with me, so that my skin broke out in an ugly rash and then I had malaria, and measles, which left me slightly deaf on one ear, and erypselas, and colitis, and finally infantile paralysis, wich shortened my left so that I was condemned to a permanent limp.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

I remember once hearing

I remember once hearing two of my mother’s freedwomen discussing modern marriage from the point of view of a woman of family. What did she gain by it? They asked. Morals were so loose now that nobody took marriage seriously any longer. Granted, a few old-fashioned men respected sufficiently to have a prejudice against children being fathered on them by their friends or household servants, and a few old-fashioned women respected their husbands sufficiently to be very careful not to become pregnant to any but them. But as a rule, any good looking woman nowadays could have any man to sleep with whom she chose. If she did marry and then tired of her husband, as usually happened, and wanted someone else to amuse herself with, there might easily be her husband’s pride or jealousy to contend with. Nor in general was she better off financially after marriage. Her dowry passed into the hands of her husband, or her father-in-law as master of the households, if he happened to be alive,; and a husband , or father-in-law, was usually a more difficult person to manage than a father, or elder brother, whose foibles she had long come to understand. Being married just meant vexatious household responsibilities. As for children, who wanted them? They interfered with the lady’s health and amusement for several months before birth and, though she had a foster mother for them immediately. Afterwards. it took time to recover from the wretched business of childbirth, and it often happened that her figure was ruined after having more than a couple. Look wow the beautiful Julia had changed by obediently gratifying Augustus’s desire for descendants. An a lady’s husband, if she was fond of him, could not be expected to keep off other women throughout the time of her pregnancy, and anyway he paid very little attention to the child when it was born. And then, as if all this were not enough, fosters mothers were shockingly careless nowadays, and the child often died. What a blessing it was that those Greeks doctors were so clever, if the thing had not gone too far-they could rid any lady of an unwanted child in two or three days , and nobody be any the worse or wiser. Of course some ladies, even modern ladies, had an old-fashioned hankering for children, but they could always buy a child for adoption into their husband’s family, from some man of decent birth who was hard pressed by his creditors...
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

Athenodorus

Athenodorus was a stately old man with dark gentle eyes, a hooked nose and the most wonderful beard that surely ever grew on human chin. . It spreads in waves down to his waist and was as white as a swan's wing. I do not make this as an idle poetical comparison, for Y am not the sort of historian who writes in pseudo epic style. I mean that it was literally as white as a swan 's wing. There were some tame swans on an artificial lake in the Gardens of Sallust, where Athenodorus and I once fed them with bread from a boat, and I remember noticing that his beard and their wings as he leaned over the side were exactly the same colour. Athenodorus used to strike his beard so slowly and rhytthmically as he talked, and told me once that it was this thar made it grow so luxuriantly . He said that invisible seeds of fire streamed off from his fingers , which were food for the hairs. This was a typical Stoic joke at the expense of Epicurean speculative philosophy.
From the book 'I Claudius', by Robert Graves

It started snowing

It started snowing shortly after 10 a.m.
The man in the wheelhouse of the fishing boat cursed. He'd heard the forecast, but hoped they might make the Swedish coast before the storm hit. If he hadn´t been held up at Hiddensee the night before, he'd have been within sight of Ystad by now and could have changed course a few degrees eastwards. As it was, there will still 7 nautical miles to go and if the snow started coming down heavily, he'd be forced to heave to and wait until visibility improved.
He cursed again. It doesn't pay to be mean,he thought. I should have done what I'd meant to do last autumn, and bought a new radar. My old Decca can't be relied on any more. I should have got one of those new American models, but I was too mean. I didn't trust them not to cheat me.
He found hard it to grasp that there was no longer a country called East Germany, that a whole nation state had ceased to exist. History had tidied up its old borders overnight.
Now there was just Germany, and nobody really knew what was going to happen when the two formerly separate peoples tried to work together. At first, when the Berlin Wall came down, he had felt uneasy. Would the enormous changes mean the carpet would be pulled from under his feet? His east German partners had reassured him. Nothing would change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, this upheaval might even create new opportunities.
From the book 'The dogs of Riga' by Henning Mankell and translated by Laurie Thompson

On one occasion

On one occasion when the Noble Order the Knights, from whom the senators were chosen, complained of the severity of his laws against bachelors, he summoned the entire order into the Market Place for a lecture. When he had them assembled there he divided them up into two groups, the married and the unmarried. The unmarried were a very much larger group than the married and he addressed separate speeches to each group, He worked himself up into a great passion with the unmarried, calling the beasts and brigands and, by a queer figure of speech, murderers of their posterity. By this time Augustus was an old man with all the petulance and crankiness of an old man who has been at the head odd affairs all his life. He asked them, had they an hallucination that they were Vestal Virgins ? At lest Vestal Virgins slept alone, which was more than they did. Would they, pray, explain why instead of sharing their beds with decent women of their own class and begetting healthy children, they squandered all their virile energy on greasy slaves-girls and nasty Asiatic-Greek prostitutes? And if he were to believe what he heard , the partner of their nightly bed-play was more often one of those creatures of loathsome profession whom he would not even name, lest the admission of their existence in the City should he construed as a condonation of it. If he had his way a man who shirked his social obligations and at the same time lived a life of sexual debauch should be subject to the same dreadful penalties as a Vestal who forgets her vows- to be buried alive.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves

Find what you love and do it

Find what you love and do it. That’s what it boils down to. I admit I didn’t always love teaching. I was out of my depth. You’re on your own in the classroom, one man or woman facing five classes every day, five classes of teenagers. One unit of energy against one hundred and seventy-five ticking bombs, and you have to find ways of saving your own life. They may like you, they may even love you, but they are young and it is the business of the young to push the old off the planet. I know I’m exaggerating but it’s like a boxer going into the ring or a bullfighter into the arena. You can’t be knocked out or gored and that’s the end of your teaching career. But if you hang on you learn the tricks. It’s hard but you have to make yourself comfortable in the classroom. You have to be selfish. The airlines tell you if oxygen fails you are to put on your mask first, even if your instinct is to save the child.
The classroom is a place of high drama. You’ll never know what you’ve done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going. You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. After a few years you develop antennae. You can tell when you’ve reached them or alienated them. It’s chemistry. It’s psychology. It’s animal instinct. You are with the kids and , as long as you want to be a teacher, there’s no escape. Don’t expect help from the people who’ve escaped the classroom, the higher-ups. They’re busy going to lunch and thinking higher thoughts. It’s you and the kids. So there’s the bell. See you later. Find what you love and do it.
From the book ‘Teacher Man’ by Frank Mc Court