I don’t like it when an arbitrary name is introduced to manufacture a rhyme. Even good lyricists do it, e.g. “I remember Mickey Doyle/Who suffled off this mortal coil,” and even songs as good as The Irish Rover sail close to the wind.

“One of the greatest literary crime novels you will read in your lifetime” it says on the front of my copy of Dodgers / Bill Beverly (Harpenden : No Exit, 2016), which I doubted, for I am a cynical man, but it is even so.

The question what is the second-best passage in Shakespeare is like the question who was the second-best Test batsman: an interesting one. Here is Bill’s 99.94 out of 100 (loses 0.06 for the repetition of “kiss”/”kisses”): Injurious time now with a robber’s haste Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how: As many farewells… Read more: Troilus

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, thought Duncan, but he wasn’t right about that.

I think the most luxurious and decadent thing it’s possible to be is a collector, of absolutely anything.