'But ... I'm totally unprepared! I have no luggage with me, no nothing.'
'None of us do. We none of us expected this. That is, in general, the nature of adventures. Adventurers tend to smell. The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for.'
K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023), 111-2
Some sentences have the power to change everything. They are the usual suspects: I love you , I hate you , I'm pregnant, I'm dying, I regret to tell you that this country is at war. But the words with the greatest power to create both havoc and marvels are these:
'I need your help.'
K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023), 57
The fact is that every large school requires an advocatus diaboli - and at Castrevenford Mr Etherege occupied this important post. He was flagrantly lacking in public spirit. He never attended important matches. He was not interested in the spiritual welfare of his boys. He lacked respect for the school as an institution. In short, he was impenitently an individualist. And if, at first sight, these characteristics do not appear particularly commendable, you must remember the context. In a school like Castrevenford a good deal of emphasis is necessarily laid on public spirit, and the thing is liable to develop, if unregulated into a rather dreary fetish. Mr Etherege helped to keep this peril at bay.
E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948), 22
He invariably found Miss Parry's efficiency a little daunting. He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie, organizing charity bazaars, visiting the sick and impoverished , training callow maidservants, implacably gardening. Some freak of destiny into which he had never enquired had compelled Miss Parry to forsake this orbit in search of a living, but its atmosphere still clung to her.
E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948), 8
