We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us – with all of us, every one – and the condition we share. And for that reason, if no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.

The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.

Still the fact remains, he had me hooked. As he had, of course, from the beginning. I had been writing my book about Johnno from the moment we met.

Enemies, like friends, told you who you were.

Mathematics. It soothed, it allowed you, once you had perceived it, to breathe.

A life wasn’t for anything. It simply was.

The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn’t imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam’s journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers.

Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.

So many things were new. Everything changed. The past would not hold and could not be held.