Philip seemed really to be born again. He breathed the circumambient air as though he had never breathed it before, and he took a child's pleasure in all the facts of the world.

The village women were bad enough, but this man looked through me, past all the walls I had built to protect myself from pain. I do not think I could have hidden anything from him, even with a lifetime's practice of hiding what I felt.

For millennia we have tried to fathom it: via selenography and selenomancy, poetry and algebra, robots and rockets.

On the catwalk, in magazines, on the legs of industry muses such as Jethro Cave (son of Nick), meggings are everywhere.