Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart.
Of course, the Führer promised a lot of things. It was what had got him where he was today.
Now we must feast!’ Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion – it seemed like cannibalism, n...
Needs must, and so on.
Mrs. Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the apartment Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn’t place. Something East...
Mr. Carver hadn’t been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a univers...
Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course,...
It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.
If there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was talking about politics.
If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.
I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were goi...
I have seen a large dog fox several times recently but it was a hot afternoon and no doubt, like most creatures, it was lying low in the shade. The fox has an unfortunate reputation. A crafty thief, o...
Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,’ Klara said. ‘If we all had it there would be no history to write about.’ She
He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw...
But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life.
Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very har...
And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old I...
After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink.
‘Why did you have children?’ Bertie asked, later in their lives. ‘Was it just the biological imperative to breed?’ ‘That’s why everyone has children,’ Viola said. ‘They just dress it up as something m...