The Saracens surrendered to Richard. And he had every last one of them beheaded. There was a hill of heads, a hill that grew gradually out of the moat and spilled on to the plain.’ Liam looked down at a potato bobbing in his soup and all of a sudden felt a little less hungry.

We’re all dead the moment we’re born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.

In a world turned upside-down, where everything was wrong, bizarre, you could at least look up at the sky and see normality. Stars that shone regardless of who won a civil war, or who should or should not be a president. Their light was billions of years old. They didn’t have a care...

She hates that word. Nice is what you call ice cream, or a paper doily, or fluffy bunny rabbit print pattern.

She moans about everything anyway. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't with a bitch like her.

It was easy enough to invent theological-sounding passages, provided you used the right language. Most people presumed you were quoting something too obscure for them to recognise.

His dying mind conjured up one last, reassuring thought. In the end, don't we all come from dust anyway? We come from dust... and we end as dust. The oh-so-short passage in between is the bit we call 'life'. Everything ends eventually. Everything.

The loners are always trouble. You know that.

I am no coward sir! I shall stand and fight!""Well, I am," said Sal. "So can we go... please?

The best way to filter out the bad seeds was to place a job ad for Prime Minister in a national newspaper and all those that applied would be automatically disqualified.