'Mr. Szalla' is my eighty-two-year-old father, Nikki. Please call me 'Wally'. Well. 'Wally'. I felt my face burn pleasantly. Wally was such a comfortable old-shoe kind of name.

One of the most fearsome creatures of Malay folklore is the pontianak.

I hope, he [William Petty] writes to Aubrey, that no man takes what I say about the living and dying of men for a mathematical demonstration. But, when the afflatus was on him, he was prone to take what he said for a mathematical demonstration himself.

As for Bradly, he reclined in kingly ease, smoking austerely, and ejecting a grunt at intervals into her narrative, confessing an interest in it.