What I was referring to, I later realised, was the erotic picaresque of my early adulthood

Remember that homily of Saul’s about ethics and morals, about ethics being money and morals being sex?

Tattoos, to him, only looked nice on non-white flesh; and Phoebe’s looked nice, louchely nice on her Amerindian glaze

She would ring him and postpone the next visit, her voice somnolent and weirdly hollow.

Martin quickly decided he liked her; she was darkly neurasthenic, but a fairly comfortable valetudinarian by now, despite her hot flushes and her migraines

The poet is taking the train from the north of England to the capital on Whit Sunday, the Christian festival of early summer, traditionally a propitious time for marriage.

Knowing how far I was from the child, the halfmade pupa, and how far I was from the adult – the finished imago.

This is a language novel, written in a futurised farrago of Romani, rhyming slang, and Russian

They adore poverty. And cold and damp and discomfort. And dirt. One mustn’t forget dirt. It’s called mendicity. It’s meant to uh, to relieve you of distractions from your full devotion to God.

a wispy breath of mist now seeped from the terraced buildings, from the rooftops with their vague crenellations…