The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.

What's invisible to us is also crucial for our own well-being.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.