Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

by Susanna Clarke

as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome.

He knew nothing of them, but he had the natural distrust that a young, rich, self-indulgent man feels for members of the clergy. Who could say what notions of extraordinary virtue and unnecessary self-sacrifice they might be daily imparting to her?

Throughout this exchange Sir Walter and Lieutenant-Colonel Grant looked as uncomfortable as any two people can who inadvertently find themselves witnesses to a little outburst of marital disharmony.

In the end is it not futile to try and follow the course of a quarrel between husband and wife? Such a conversation is sure to meander more than any other. It draws in tributary arguments and grievances from years before – all quite incomprehensible to any but the two people they concern most nearly. Neither party is ever proved right or wrong in such a case, or, if they are, what does it signify?

There was an elderly bunch of celery that had lived too long and too promiscuously in close companionship with the charcoal for its own good.

They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of any body else’s) that they would not have been at all surprized to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city – until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful.

And the snow! That was the oddest thing of all. It hung, suspended in the air, in huge, soft white flakes, as big as sovereigns. “Magic!” he thought in disgust. He walked a little way down Mitre-court, looking in the windows of the shops. Lamps were still lit; goods were lying heaped or scattered over the counters – silks, tobacco, sheet-music; fires were still burning in the hearths but their flames were frozen. He looked back and discovered that he had made a sort of tunnel through the three-dimensional lace-work of snow. It was, of all the strange things he had seen in his life, the strangest.

We will need an envoy, a path and a handsel.