The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)

by Alan Bradley

I have to admit, though, that Cynthia was a great organiser, but then so were the men with whips who got the pyramids built.

But tonight he was at peace. Tonight he had dressed for the symphony in a dark suit and what might have been a regimental tie, and his shoes had been polished until they shone like mirrors. He sat motionless on the bench beneath the roses, his eyes closed, his face upturned like one of the contented Coptic saints I had seen in the art pages of Country Life, his shock of white hair lit from behind by an unearthly beam from the setting sun. It was pleasant to know that he was there.

I remembered that Beethoven’s symphonies had sometimes been given names: the Eroica, the Pastoral, and so forth. They should have called this one the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.

Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We’re past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like ‘boof-boof’ - just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we’re still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we’re invisible - except when we choose not to be.

remember this: inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: it changes the face of the world.’

a rich, mellifluous flow of words that came forth as if he had a wooden organ pipe for a larynx. The BBC must breed these people on a secret farm.

How curious it was, I thought, that we humans had taken millions of years to crawl up out of the swamps, and yet within minutes of death we were already tobogganing back down the slope.

(my old friend chloral hydrate, I noted: C2H3Cl3O2 - a powerful hypnotic that when slipped in alcohol to American thugs was called a Mickey Finn; in England it was slipped to highly strung housewives by country doctors and called ‘something to help you sleep’).