blue

‘Duty.’ She repeated the word after him, slowly, as if it had a taste that must be analysed, a flavour pungent with the past: castor oil and algebra and unshed tears and hangnails and ink from leaky pens. Miss Clarvoe was a connoisseur. She could pick out and identify each flavour, no matter how mouldy with age.

The mud isn’t so bad, at first. He wades through it with barely a grimace. It’s no worse than Agincourt, or the Somme. At least there’s no bullets flying, no hot shell fragments raining down or French coursers charging at him. The only problem is the mail, which weighs him down. And Christ, it’s a hot day. Summers never used to be this hot, he’s su

So they went shoulder to shoulder and started pushing me out of the pack. Subtle stuff, at first. Somehow everyone knew about my cousin who’s in for dealing smack. Fingerprint results never made it to me, so I never found out about the link between my case and a whole string of burglaries.

Such was Lydgate’s plan of his future: to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world. He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty, without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life interesting quite apart from the cultus

the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid

But a recent, wide-ranging and in-depth (I know – impressive!) analysis of Iron Age burial practices across Britain has challenged lots of the assumptions that have become embedded in archaeology – particularly the idea of consistent rites within certain regions, but even the idea of a background of consistent ‘invisible rites’ right across the cou

Overhead there’s the whole black dome of the sky, and every star is out. Imagine also that time is racing by: that for us each hour is ten thousand years. So as we stand there watching, the oaks and willows quickly become immense, die back, reseed, and grow again – and overhead the stars are dancing in their proper motion: Orion throwing his spear,

In death his severed head and arms were displayed on stakes at a place which came to be known as Oswald’s Tree or Oswestry and his skull, a sacred possession of Durham Cathedral, exhibits a sword-cut wide enough to accommodate three fingers. His post-mortem career was as extraordinary as his life and death had been. Many miracles were said to have

Besides, there is a man’s character beforehand to speak for him.’ ‘But, my dear Mrs Casaubon,’ said Mr Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, ‘character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.’