The city's full of people who you just see around.

He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine.

Ponder just let it happen. It's because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.

It's the end game that people dread and that's what I'm scared of

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

Raising the flag and singing the anthem are, while somewhat suspicious, not in themselves acts of treason.

He looked up at them, a scruffy Napoleon with his laces trailing, exiled to a rose-trellised Elba.