He needed no intercom to tell him this: that if it hadn't been Dave who so blighted the world, it would've been some other god — Jeebus or Joey or Ali […]

But that is not the only alternative, except in the minds of latter-day Jacobins for whom the stratifications of the ancien régime are more real than the proletarianizations of their own time.

“Lady—Honest Crier, I know thou knewest old Father Christmas; I am sent to thee from an honest schollar of Oxford (that hath given me many a hug and kisse in Christmasse time when we have been merry) to cry Christmas, for they hear that he is gone from hence, and that we have lost the poor old man; you know what marks he hath, and how to cry him.

‘A healthy adolescent might be expected to produce five hundred billion blood cells a day.’