Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.

The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.