He leaned into Le Voir’s face with the calliper and breathed on him, holding forth on this new science of which calibration was the test; these measurements would describe classes of being and we who...

There is no ‘what if’. Only in stories.

Ours was the age of enlightenment, he said, when the battle cry was, “We must know, we shall know!”, and reason would depose superstition and we be liberated by it.

People like De Buys, they astonish me with their courage – or perhaps it is a lack in them; they cannot imagine. I think that is one way to be not afraid: in a covered...