Also, fear is sneaky. It establishes a foothold and sits, content. While you confront it, it is small and weak, and looks back at you with timorous eyes, so that you wonder how it could ever stir you for more than a moment. Turn your back, and it waxes, casting giant shadows and flickering in the corner of your eye, leaning lingeringly on the

It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.

And yes, there are broad-shouldered, termagant women, swinging a pick with the boys, and slender, spiritual men rolled around compassionate hearts waiting at home for them, or for some macho fellow with a lumberjack moustache who prefers the physical company of men to the alarming recesses of the female anatomy. There are boys who like boys and

'What K did – what Joel Athens Lantern did, because that was K's name once upon a time, and I can tell you that because no one of that name exists any more – was file a request for some personal time and go back to work. Because that was what he knew was the professional thing to do – and if he wasn't a father any more, or a husband, the least he

It's okay to kill huge numbers of civilians by mistake, of course, but killing them on purpose is illegal, slap-on-the-wrist time.

But this pie had been subjected to the kind of abuse which no pastry of any kind should have to put up with. It had been tempest-tossed. It had been a brave pie, but ultimately an ordinary one; it was not a pie of steel. It had split and withered. The filling had smeared the outer skin with red, sugary juices; this pie was a casualty. The only

We run into a small town where a lot of men are killing each other in a fairly energetic and random way.

It is to me he brings his worst ideas, and it is my job to squash them and propose, as an alternative to connecting an electric torch directly to the mains power so as to make a lightsaber, some activity less mortally perilous.