blue

The tidying up. There’s a lot of that. So much accumulates, year after year. Then there’s a mini-explosion, and all the items that have been gathered together—the letters, the books, the passports, the photos, the favourite things kept in drawers and boxes or on shelves—all of this is strewn in the wake of the departing rocket or comet or wave of e

I stroll over to the side of the temple to examine the relief carvings. I find the pharaoh—he’s not hard to spot—wearing the dual crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. I wonder who among my fellow onlookers knows that there’s something strange about this particular pharaoh. It isn’t his profile or regalia; those are conventional enough. It’s his name, C

Strange things can happen, with mines and caves and tunnels. Especially if they’re left abandoned. A crack can form between this world and the Otherworld. Smaller monstrosities can squeeze their way through. But he’s never known a big queen dragon to slither through a faerie hole like that. They’re proud creatures; it would be beneath their dignity

And these days I seek out my faith in other doctrines’ – he gestured at a spectrograph nearby, and a four-inch reflecting telescope fitted with filters to aid in observations of the sun. ‘I supplement God with physics, and understand each as well as the other. Which is to say: not in the least! But I find it magnificent, knowledge piled on knowledg

Far up the mountain, where the trees thinned out, just on the dividing line between sunshine and shadow, was a single, isolated building, as dwarfed by its surroundings as a fly drowning in a churn of milk. “The Bella Vista,” said the Colonel, almost reverently. There was a silence. “I didn’t realise it was so far up,” said Emmy at last, in a small

living in a detached way is, in fact, a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but from yourself.

When was this? Nell counts on her fingers. It must have been only five or six years after the war—that blank time following a calamity when people are pretending it didn’t happen.

The thought of Mrs Baker back at the cottage with the dogs, the windmill towering darkly above them, the November wind roaring over the Downs, slamming into the aged bricks, tugging at the rotting sweeps and rattling the fan stage made Astrid very uneasy indeed. As they’d driven away down the hill that morning, she’d turned to look back at the towe

she seemed capable of being young, attractive, and at a ball, without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her, and without exaggerated feelings of extatic delight or inconceivable vexation on every little trifling occurrence.