He could always remember the horses’ names, but never the names of his kids; it was also said that George could tell the quality of a horse just by feeling its muscle tone.

I have also insisted on renaming the whole book POOR THINGS.  Things are often mentioned in the story and every single character (apart from Mrs. Dinwiddie and two of the General’s parasites) is called poor or call themselves that sometime or other.

The figure of John Harvard sat, dignified and aloof, staring across the Yard in a mood of piety and godliness.  Darconville walked back through several centuries under the pleasant trees and had the strange feeling that, in peering up a dim stairway or through an old window or into some dark chamber-and-study, one might just happen to catch an anachronistic glimpse of some students reading The Tatler by candlelight instead of working their sophemes or construing their Demonsthenes or perhaps a group of lads, with wigs a-flap, skipping up out of the buttery – the steam of hasty-pudding in the air – and balancing tankards and sizings of bread and beer or maybe several young blades drinking rumbullion and gowling against the excessive measures of Lord North, Grenville, and Townsend until one of them might leap up to shout, “Step outside and repeat that asservation, Villiers, you damned Tory!”

grig (n) 1. a lively, bright person. 2. a short-legged hen. 3. a young eel.

“You’ve been thinking about mayonnaise a lot, mademoiselle.”

“Meet me tonight,” a sudden fierce whisper, “out at the Mayonnaise Works, and you shall perhaps understand things it is given only to a few to know.  There will be a carriage waiting.”  She pressed his hand and was gone in a mist of vetiver, abruptly as the other evening.

I’ve been observing the gradual decline of noses throughout the past few years, but a total absence of noses altogether takes things too far.

Gender has the following effects in the game:

• Only female monsters can lay eggs.
• Eggs in a male character’s inventory may hatch tame monsters.
• Males are seduced by succubi, females are seduced by incubi.
• Nymphs “seduce” males and “charm” females.
• The Cave(wo)man and Priest(ess) classes have different names.
• It determines how you are addressed (purely cosmetic).

A race of turtle-like creatures conquers Earth, imposing a gentler set of values on humankind, outlawing destructive technology, and denying the validity of human scientific theories. When their home planet disappears into a black hole, however, the aliens’ only hope for the future hinges on the possibility that humanity’s flawed sciences might contain a glimmer of truth.

“Chinchito, a jumped-up circus midget”

“East Coast nerve case Thrapston Cheesely III”

“a certain Madame Aubergine”

“the provocative and voracious Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin”

“Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, a traveling insurrectionist”

“the messenger, one ‘Plug’ Loafsley”

“Mr. Gideon Candlebrow . . . , who had made his bundle back 
during the Lard Scandal of the ’80s”

“Captain Q. Zane Toadflax, Commander”

“a civilian passenger, Stilton Gaspereaux”

“an American stoker named O. I. C. Bodine”

“a wealthy coffee scion named Günther von Quassel”

“the noted Uyghur troublemaker Al Mar-Fuad”

“a telepathic waiter named Pityu”

“a fandango girl named Chiquita”