Besides, if you're going to die horribly, you might as well do it with style.

Despite his crimped shirts and flowing mane (or perhaps because of them) I had seen no evidence as yet that Nathaniel even knew what a girl was. If he'd ever met one, chances are they'd both have run screaming in opposite directions.

Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.

It's the same with spirit guises; show me a sweet little choirboy or a smiling mother and I'll show you the hideous fanged strigoi it really is. (Not always. Just sometimes. *Your* mother is absolutely fine, for instance. Probably.)

In recent weeks it has come to my attention that many caravans have met with disaster; they have not gotten through."I grunted wisely. "Probably ran out of water. That's the thing about deserts. Dry.""Indeed. A fascinating analysis. But survivors reaching Hebron report differently: monsters fell upon them in the wastes.""What, fell upon them in a squashed-them kind of way?""More the leaped-out-and-slew-them kind. (...)

Oh, the boots were on the other eight feet now.

The Evasive Cartwheel ™ © etc., Bartimaeus of Uruk, circa. 2800 B.C.E. Often imitated, never surpassed. As famously memorialized in the New Kingdom tomb paintings of Ramses III— you can just see me in the background of The Dedication of the Royal Family before Ra, wheeling out of sight behind the pharaoh.

The object that was pinning me haplessly to the ground, like a butterfly on a collector's tray, was of twentieth-century origin and of very specific function.Oh, all right, it was a public lavatory.

The boy was silent as we went. Unsurprising, this—he had seldom left London in his life before. I guessed him to be gazing about in dumbstruck admiration."What an appalling place," he [Nathaniel] said. - Bartimaeus