Free The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

Hypocrisy was not only about telling lies, it was about saying one thing and doing quite the other. People who did that were usually roundly condemned, but again this might not be as simple as some would suggest. Would it be hypocritical for an alcoholic to advise against drinking alcohol, or a glutton to recommend a diet? The recipient of the advice might well level charges of hypocrisy in such a case, but only if the person giving the advice claimed that he did not drink or eat too much himself. If he merely concealed his own vices, then he might still be considered a hypocrite, but his hypocrisy might be no bad thing. It certainly did not harm anybody, and indeed it might even help (provided that it remained undiscovered). This was a topic which would have been ideal for the Sunday Philosophy Club. Perhaps she would try to get people together for precisely such a discussion. Who could resist an invitation to discuss hypocrisy? The members of the club, she suspected.
    Her boiled egg placed on the table, she sat down with a copyof
The Scotsman
and a freshly brewed cup of coffee, while Grace went off to start the laundry. There was nothing of note in the paper—she could not bring herself to read an account of the doings of the Scottish Parliament—and so she quickly passed to the crossword. Four across:
He conquers all, a nubile tram
(11). Tamburlaine, of course. It was an old clue and it even appeared as the final line of one of Auden’s poems. WHA, as she thought of him, liked to do the crossword, and would have
The Times
delivered to Kirchstetten for that very purpose. There he lived, in his legendary domestic mess, with manuscripts and books and overflowing ashtrays, doing the
Times
crossword each day, with a tattered volume of the big
Oxford
open on a chair beside him. She would have so loved to have met him, and talked, even just to thank him for everything that he had written (except the last two books), but she rather feared that he might have written her off as one of his legion of bluestocking admirers. Six down:
A homespun poet, a pig in charge of sheep?
(4). Hogg, naturally. (But a coincidence, nonetheless.)
    She finished the crossword in the morning room, allowing her second cup of coffee to get too cool to drink. She felt uneasy for some reason, almost queasy, and she wondered whether she had not perhaps had rather too much to drink the previous evening. But, going over it, she had not. She had had two smallish glasses of wine at the opening, and a further one, if somewhat larger, in the Vincent Bar. That was hardly enough to unsettle her stomach or trigger a headache. No, her feeling of unease was not physical; she was upset. She had imagined that she had recovered from witnessing that awful event, but clearly she had not, and it was still having its psychological effect. Putting down the newspaper, she looked up at the ceiling and wondered whether this was what they called post-traumatic stress disorder. Soldierssuffered from it in the First World War, although they called it shell shock then, and shot them for cowardice.
    She thought of the morning ahead. There was work to be done; at least three journal articles were waiting to be sent out to referees, and she would have to despatch them that morning. Then there was an index to be prepared for a special issue that was due to appear later that year. She did not enjoy indexing and she had been putting the task off. But it would have to be sent to the general editor for approval before the end of the week, which meant that she would have to sit down to it either that day or the following day. She looked at her watch. It was almost nine-thirty. If she worked for three hours she would get through most, if not all, of the index. That would take her to twelve-thirty, or perhaps almost one o’clock. And then she could go and have lunch with Cat, if she was free. The thought cheered her up: a good spell of work followed by a relaxed chat with her niece was