“Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything.”

“Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.”

“I saw a pair of great tits some days ago. (Massingham Major, you are a dirty-minded boy, and if you snigger again, you will do five hundred lines.) The squeaking-wheel song of Parus major is always gladsome, a precursor to interesting scenes at the bird table. On this occasion, however, what hearing and seeing the two greenery-yallery Paridæ first called up in me was a memory from last year’s early Springtide: an ærial near-collision. A very young squirrel – native red, I am rejoiced to say – was leaping from one tree trunk to another, adjacent, just as a great tit was exploding outwards in flight from the second tree. You never saw a more indignant bird or a more startled squirrel in your life.”

“Magnus's eyes gleamed. "He seems to like you. I saw him going for your hand out there like a squirrel diving for a peanut.”

“We were of thirteen minds, like a tree, in which there is one Red-tail and eleven squirrel parts.”

“I am a crazy, rabid squirrel! I want my cookies!” — Hammy, the Squirrel”