“All is strange to me,” said the human louse to the wood louse. He spoke the lice language with its beautiful vowel sounds to perfection.

“On the contrary,” said the wood louse, speaking the same ancient tongue but with a rude rural intonation, “you are the only strange thing here to me.”

“Could you direct me——” the human louse enquired, giving its words a classical resonance, indicative of the fact that its ancestors had lived with the Romans, “to any human skin in this vicinity?”

The wood louse rudely disabused this dainty traveller of his high hope; and reported that the only skin except the bark of trees available in that quarter was the skin of a rabbit that had been caught in a trap a year ago.

These regions come in the form of blobs and sheets which may be associated with worms.

The Fire Queen, whose extreme beauty existed somewhere between a Babylonian death goddess and an Asian supermodel, advanced towards Thrix’s desk, fire smouldering in her eyes.

An interesting digression on the significance of cats. Pagenstecher tells his companions how, according to an old Baden flood legend, human race was saved by a cat.

Finally, while most centrist dads are men, in this age of gender fluidity it’s important to acknowledge that the spirit of the centrist dad can reside within women too.

Their insistence that they are flexible and free is belied by the rigid emptiness of their daily round: sit on the beach, climb a hill to see a peasant or a goat, screw expertly.

Weak, awkward, but lords of the virtual realms, programmers were as powerful in the electronic world as they were impotent in the real one – until INTERCAL, the first language that didn’t respect them, the first language whose grammar turned them into subs.

It was not a sign of Philip’s littleness but of his greatness that he could get so vehement in a dispute with a little girl. Napoleon would have done so; so would Alexander the Great; so would Nelson, so would Achilles. Most modern rulers would have laughed at her and retorted with some quip too ironical for her to understand.

Yet, with the utmost complacency, he stages for us a banquet, and a banquet at which we are invited to entertain the forbidding hypothesis that unseasoned and unappetizing food may be served, but at which we are finally relieved to see the diners, their appetite “whetted” by “sensuality,” fall upon food that has been delicately prepared.

He jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls’ track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex. (The White House, reaching for exculpatory context, noted that this was a girls’ team from another school, not his own.)