orange

The Lively was a fine example, an admirable example, of the Whiggish state of mind at its best; and Jack was a Tory. He admired her, but it was with a detached admiration, as though he were in charge of a brother-officer’s wife, an elegant, chaste, unimaginative woman, running her life on scientific principles.

No particular type of person sets out in life to become a museum guard, so countless types take on the role, each marching to their own drummer. At the New Yorker, my peers had all recently graduated from elite private schools and maybe had worked another job in publishing. At the Met, I know guards who have commanded a frigate in the Bay of Bengal

Fishing net weights and hooks suggest that fish remained important. This is confirmed by levels of 15N in the bones of people who lived on the Dnieper Rapids, which indicate a meat diet containing more than 50% fish.

Turner had painted it in a turbulent sunset, a sailing boat listing dangerously at the base of its sea-lashed cliffs. St Cuthbert, on Lindisfarne, had preached to the eider ducks which still nested on Bowmont Point, and from the white needle of Longstone lighthouse, Grace Darling had rowed into legend, bringing rescue to the shipwrecked wretches on

He smiles at her. ‘Be a lot easier if we had a river goddess on our side.’ She pulls a face. ‘Oh, you know me. I try not to get involved. Affairs of mortal men are nowt to do with me.’ ‘Bollocks.’ ‘Bah.’ ‘What was that business at Nantwich, then? In Cromwell’s war?’ Nimue tries to look innocent. ‘Don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Yes you do.’ ‘Sometimes

It feels like I’m trapped inside my body. It decides when I get hungry, and when I’ll get my period. From birth to death, you have to keep eating and making money just to stay alive. I see what working every night does to my mum. It takes it out of her. But what’s it all for? Life is hard enough with just one body. Why would anyone ever want to mak

The sorting room is vast – the size of a small city block with an equally large population: men sorting packets and parcels and bulk mail and letters; men running machines; men dividing the post into neighbourhoods and streets, ready for local delivery; men pushing York trolleys around the floor; men laughing; men shouting.

Concentrating my awareness on my frontal lobe, I rubbed my thoughts together with ferocious speed, like a person rubbing sticks together to make fire, and waited for the smoke to trickle from the wood. Under the assumption that the tomboy was a decent person, I tried to think up a scenario where I’d say one thing and she’d respond agreeably, after

She is slow, and un-daring, and uptight. She is maybe a little boring. She doesn’t need to prove anything; she is exactly what she is through and through.

Dr Levy was playing chess with the blond actor from the Burg Theatre, but it was hard to concentrate for today he knew with certainty that he would never resit his medical exams in English. At forty-two he was too old to begin again – and even if he passed, they would find some other regulation for keeping him from practising. Not that he blamed th