There are digressions on literature and the cinema and the tarot pack and crap-shooting and — above all, since Anthony Burgess has ever been a logodaedalus — language.

And thereupon, behold, a knight on a black horse appeared, clothed in jet-black velvet, and with a tabard of black linen about him.

Kafir makes better forage than the duras.

A planar projection of a three-dimensional object is its projection onto a plane.