“Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.”

“One thing I had learnt, the last person you should ask for a solution is the author. If he knew where he was going, he’d stop dead in his tracks.”

“The poet he was escorting into Wales was a Horus-headed dud of some personal magnetism. The hair was feathered gell, the nose hooked. He stared at me and he didn’t. His eyes belonged to a magician; one bored into you, right through the lens into the depths of the vitreous humor—while the other popped and wobbled in the style of Ben Turpin. He folded in on himself, profile sharp as an axe. A labrys. This man would have no problem seeing around a corner.”

“Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral.”

“Light is all memory.”

“...drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife.”

“The faster we walk, the more ground we lose.”