With their multiple narrators, labyrinthine story-within-a-story narrations, echoic redoublings and repetitions, and complex forms of self-referentiality, they repeatedly circumvent their own ostensibly orderly plot progressions.

There would be no more money until every last thing on the shelves was eaten. Now they were down to Sun Maid raisins and Sainsbury's Wheat Bisks. For three days the children had eaten only Wheat Bisks in water and handfuls of raisins.

Evelyn recorded a suggestion that the Society might take as its coat of arms a representation of a pair of crossed telescopes surmounted by the Medicean planets.

A person who is not capable of contracting or who has limited capacity to contract can neither establish nor terminate residence without the consent of his legal representative.