"The rose within herself her sweetness closed."

"Ernest Bramah's China, then, is the fantastic bogus China of convention, not the real historical thing at all. He wrote of it in a prose so perfectly conceived that it becomes a miracle of style. As H…"

"Alasdair Gray: 'I regard my work as deeply unfashionable'" · Guardian video interview with Charlotte Higgins"

"Back and back the planes had come with their hail of bullets, while sampans sank and went under. Back and back until there was but one empty sampan left drifting on the water. Then the planes had come…"

"There's a lyric in the middle of the song that says, "I want to decide between survival and bliss." Basically I'm talking about the difference between really being alive and really embracing the reaso…"