Well, a pub, internet cafe, juice bar, water bar, snack bar, pottery-making bar, toy bar, ball bar, piano bar . . . which kind of bar do you like?

Something about him reminded me of one of those figures from old-fashioned playing cards or the sort used by fortune-tellers, a print straight from the pages of an incunabulum: his presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in its Sunday best.

'I thought you would have preferred to have been with them in that stinking urinal of the planets, looking for bog-oranges.' Kempe's sympathy towards the plight of the Irish was well known, and he had no sympathisers here tonight.

1990, Sesquiannual Meeting of the American Society for Rickettsiology and Rickettsial Diseases; 8 (the society holds meetings roughly every 1.5 years, e.g. September 1989, May 1991, and September 1992)