“... and vanished from the story, leaving him to his drills and shovels. Lyttle posed in the rubble, silver hair combed, neat in open-necked shirt and faded trenchcoat. ‘Artists don’t need to take on a moral tone,’ Russo said. ‘I kind of like the idea of the artist as devil’s advocate.’ But she wasn’t prepared to inflict the Mole Man on the editor ...”

“... but so did Napoleon’s. Why, then, does it seem so laughable to rank MacArthur with Grant and Lee, let alone with Marlborough and Cromwell? Why has no one pinned down the MacArthur mystery? One reason is that MacArthur’s most notable innovations were in propaganda and politics, fields in which few soldiers (or military writers) feel at home. But the ...”

“... not say. The senior partner, whom we had first consulted, was a distinguished looking figure, silver-haired, loud-talking, a Rotarian and pillar of the community. Unsurprisingly he was also a pull your socks up merchant and did not hold with depression. At his happiest going down potholes to assist stricken cavers, he was less adept at getting patients ...”

“... that morning was a diagram, a blue bar-chart with columns which were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished. This is how we delete you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white ...”

“... in Iran in 1979. His cousin Masoud said the former chef loved his flat, with his hookah and silver samovar. Something happened to these people, a life, yes indeed, but also a death, a very public one, and to ignore it, or let it go in a cloud of unknowing, would fail to mark their attempts at survival. It is hard to think about, but these people all ...”