Loeser’s favourite book in Blimk’s shop, where he spent most of his afternoons, was still Dames! And how to Lay them. He referred to it constantly, like a psalter, with an inexhaustible excitement at the...

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

What does it do?” said Loeser. “You feel as if you’re being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it’s as if all the different weights and cares of the...

If I want to feel as if I’m being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father’s ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room...

…a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.

She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.