[H]e had little time or respect for the rich skip bitches who were his neighbours, useless fake-tanned women with plastic smiles and silicone tits who spent their husbands' money on afternoon teas, endless shopping and personal trainers.

[…] all the three theatres have been repeatedly altered, and refitted, and enlarged, to make them capacious of the crowds, that nightly flock to them;

[…]who have expounded Scripture out of its Senses, and have so Commented the Laws thereof

By chance—ill chance, as it had turned out—Georg Vasel, the young German airfield engineer, found himself at the remote town of Chuguchak on the Sinkiang-Soviet border at the time. It was an unhealthy place for a European just then, and it was from a prison yard that Vasel watched ‘regiment after regiment’ marching through the snow towards Urumchi, followed by ‘greyish-green monsters - armoured cars with machine-guns mounted on their steel turrets’.