Eventually, Pran and Savita decided by correspondence on Maya. Its two simple syllables meant, among other things: the goddess Lakshmi, illusion, fascination, art, the goddess Durga, kindness, and the name of the mother of Buddha. It also meant: ignorance, delusion, fraud, guile, and hypocrisy; but no one who named their daughter Maya ever paid any attention to those pejorative possibilities.

• - - 'Why ever not, Ma?' said Meenakshi.'It's a very Bengali name, a very nice name.'

And what about the cracked driving axles that took a number of the Southern Merchant Navy Pacifics out of action and brought various borrowed strangers on to Southern metals, such as V2 2-6-2s from the Eastern Region?

[…] they can't be the same what?

The [Washington] Post's proprietor through those turbulent [Watergate] days, Katharine Graham, held a double place in Washington’s hierarchy: at once regal Georgetown hostess and scrappy newshound, ready to hold the establishment to account. That is a very American position. British journalists shun complete respectability, feeling a duty to be ready to savage the mighty, or rummage through their bins.