“... upon industrialism, Upon milk white metal, upon furnaces all night. Having got the thing one may fill it when required, at leisure, From any river, from the common tap; Those cloud-pipes being frozen, with marine tears; And there will always be flowers to stick into it in the springtime. Lies would be more serious if one could lie about the matter in ...”

“... laid gifts on the altar, shyly prayed: ‘Gods, if it’s true that you can give anything, grant I may make love –.’ Too shy to say ‘the maid’, he said, ‘– to someone like my ivory maid!’ But Venus, there in person, knew what he intended and, to show that she approved, the altar flames shot up into the air three times. Hastening home, the ...”

“... come to hate round and round the camp like a bum. I think I’m going to say I want to leave you. May I be smothered in sweet pollen, flowers of the morning, morning flowers. I want to leave you. The hearts on the shutters make the houses look like cuckoo clocks, or little chalets – can you hear the cowbells tinkle? – where Mother Bear and Father Bear eat ...”

“... go-sees I realise I must have seen them at least half a dozen times before. On other occasions it may be a totally new, untried fresh face that comes hesitantly through my door. Alas, Noelle is one of the hardy perennials who has been going on go-sees for years with very little to show for it. When I was going through her book I asked how old she was. She ...”

“... time, Even the rocks,’ she read, ‘will change their shape.’ She doubted it. One day in May, Miss Frith Lifted her eyes from all the labels on The labelling desk, and put down her brush, And observed that the dust in the still air Was thinner than it had been. It was quiet, The builders gone and the renovations Finished till the next ...”

“... to us. Was it the innocence of youth to think an angel told the legal truth? The cat of veracity may have had its claws retracted, but we knew its powerful paws: we’d seen the ruins, and the ships on fire; I met a boy from Belsen, and a man maltreated by the aesthetes from Japan. The cat of history, fed but not for hire, sits on Big Brother at its own ...”

“... the bow, tapped softly on the bridge, imagined I heard a voice in the soft harmonics. A Tattoo It may be slow, but something works for change beneath the collarbone, behind the eyes; and something more is waiting to be found: whether we bring to the surface a pure Vesalian blue, or let the animals beneath the skin emerge, in a web of crimson and ...”

“... waters of our particular rivers, and this terrible readiness to worry about your own family first, may be the least of our problems but I think my daughter, my daughter, how is she going to deal with ...”

“... a Pictish road. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Lonker: a hole in a wall, a yett through which Sheep may slip, or a burn, a stream flow under. Every wall, from Hadrian’s to dry-stane dyke, Longs for a lonker’s Huddled, nervous rush of living fleece Against its whinstane, a vindauga, a wind’s eye, a window To see through, snow’s gurgling, flushing ...”

“... Jowell, who keeps rattling the charter, then pretending she hasn’t. She needs to be watched: she may be a weasel in talcum powder. One person who saw it coming was Ludovic Kennedy who, hearing Hutton named to head the inquiry, correctly predicted the outcome. I looked up the judge, then Sir Brian Hutton, in Kennedy’s Thirty-Six Murders, where he pinpoints ...”

“... alone inside of her house on the headland.The alcove the old woman sits in features objects that may impress her guests – except that through time she, herself, has been well humbled.*Her son enters the room to say, ‘You are so rude to me!’‘Yes, I am,’ she says. ‘Where is Neddie?’‘Napping’.‘Please leave me be,’ she says.Then Neddie can ...”

“... elated? – enamoured? – drunk? – their effect on me is wholly pleasing.Area of SurpriseShe may have been on the brink, whatever that means.She had set her teeth upon the edge of it – a gift from me – her lavaliere, that she next swung side to side, even as its chain cut into her throat.And I guess everybody knows how to fall in love. I did and I ...”

“... publishing is for a second-hand book … to bring no financial benefit to the author – the book may have saved the reader from suicide, but there’s no mechanism for the reader to acknowledge the person who made this possible.’ Suicide, pro and contra, is a big theme in The Last Samurai, so this is not as melodramatic a thought as it ...”

“... if this were a well-attested social problem. To the modern reader, the cast of females in the book may seem so multifariously ghastly as to suggest a private vendetta against the sex in general. But everything for Sainty is a history of disappointments. At Cambridge he idolises his young tutor Gerald Newby, in whom he senses a kindred spirit, an idealist ...”

“... on Cheney’s either. The Sharon analogy speaks powerfully against Klein’s analysis. Free trade may be ‘an imperial project’, as she argues, but this does not mean that all imperial projects are primarily concerned with ‘seizing new markets directly for Western multinationals on the battlefields of pre-emptive wars’. Other goals, such as destroying ...”