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Guillermina’s nakedness is like the nakedness of trees in autumn: what it reveals is a lack.

This is from the second story The remains of the secret. But it also describes how she writes. This second story is a devastating miniature on female friendship. Akin 'My brilliant friend', as profound, moving and emotionally powerful but with even less hope for the girls.

What a writer!

That first story’ Perfect Breakfast’ would make Taiwan Travelogue look trivial in just 5 pages. It is not about colonialism but it is about food and about a woman, presumably the housewife who makes it. Such an incredible punch.

The characters existed more strongly in her mind than real people did…The afterglow would make her anxious – anxious enough to read the same book again. Finishing a book was something she never wanted to do. And it was not just being steeped in the character or plot – it was a fright to her that a feeble story could contain a truth that assembled far from the meaning of the actual words.

Everyone laughed. Ega protested vigorously, enjoying himself now. Craft was nothing but a desiccated Englishman, suckled on the flat bosom of Political Economics, incapable of understanding the world of poetry that could be contained in an ‘Ay’.

We do the same as you, the literati. Literature used 2b about the imagination, fantasy, ideas. Now it’s all about reality, experience, facts, documentation. Well, politics in Portugal has also joined the school of realism. ..when 2 main parties were the Regenerators and the Historicals, politics was about progress, road-building, liberty, chatter…Nowadays, it’s facts–money, money, money! Marvellous money!’

‘Did Vilaca really imagined Ega said that in a few centuries’s time, we would still be eating vegetables? The vegetable habit was merely a remnant of man’s coarse animality. In time, a truly civilised being would eat only artificial products, out of bottles and in pill form, manufactured in the state’s own labs.’

It is written in the 80s of the 19th century but Ega has had a point:-)

I don't believe in the human soul. I never have. I believe that people are like portmanteaux-packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle....

What a sentence:
‘While I am here, I am there, lifting my face to the dim sky, and it seems to me it must be raining all over the world- that the whole earth is drenched, is sounding with soft, quick patter or hard, steady drumming, or gurgling and something that is like sobbing and laughing mingled together, and that light, playful splashing that is of water falling into still lakes and flowing rivers.’

What a sentence:
‘While I am here, I am there, lifting my face to the dim sky, and it seems to me it must be raining all over the world- that the whole earth is drenched, is sounding with soft, quick patter or hard, steady drumming, or gurgling and something that is like sobbing and laughing mingled together, and that light, playful splashing that is of water falling into still lakes and flowing rivers.’

In the 18&19th cent most direct protests against social injustice were in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason, and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness.

I see reflected in the mirror a sprig of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near, so near that the petals look like the pores of a skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the side fully lit by the last light of the sun.

You simplify and dramatise the whole thing with your literary mathematics. I don’t waste any words with the argument of experience, because your type never accepts experience, nor the notion of experience..

The reality of the individual..is an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.

On the crown of the passional relation I live,dead to oneness,non-entity and unalone,untouched by the pulls of the solitudes,at rest above the deep green central flowing falling away on either hand to the special margins,the red solitude and the violet solitude,the red oneness and the violent oneness;at the summit of the bow, indifferent to the fake integrities,the silence between my eyes,the body between the wings.

With raiding no longer an option in home territory, Caliph Umar 644took the Levant, inclJerusalem.The new rulers didn’t care what religion their subjects practised, as long as they paid their taxes; Christians, Jews and Muslims all worshipped the same God of Abraham, as far as Muslims were concerned;Jews were now allowed to live in Jerusalem for the 1st time since the Roman destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 ce.

Syrian Elagabalus, became emperor at the age of fourteen. The young man brought w him to Rome the Syrian god Elagabal, a black meteorite, to replace Jupiter at the head of the Rom pantheon. This was not his only outrage against local taste: he was said to have married several men&a Vestal Virgin, eaten parrots and fed them to pet lions.He was assassinated by soldiers in a latrine @eighteen and thrown into the Tiber.

The evidence for Gauls in London comes from a tablet ~100ce records the sale of a woman from northern Gaul to a man called Vegetus for 600 denarii. This is a standard price, equivalent to 2y salary for a legionary soldier; what is more interesting is that he is the slave of a slave belonging to the emperor himself. The document says that the woman was handed over in a healthy condition&has no history of running away.

What am I in this instant? I am a typewriter making the dry keys echo on the dark and humid early hours. For a long time I haven’t been people. They wanted me to be an object. I’m an object. An object dirty with blood. That creates other objects and the typewriter all of us. It demands. The mechanism demands and demands my life. But I don’t obey totally: if I must be an object let it be an object that screams.

Do I not have a plot to my life? for I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living. And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling. My crippled angel who contorts all elusive, my angel who fell from heavens to the hell where he lives savouring evil.

I’ll return to the unknown part of myself …To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness is search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable, perilous it. Life of elementary matter.

My eyes are shut. I am pure unconsciousness. They already cut the umbilical cord: I am unattached in the universe. I don’t think but feel the it. With my eyes I blindly seek the breast: I want milk. No one taught me to want. But I already want. I’m lying with my eyes open looking at the ceiling. Inside is the darkness. An I that pulses already forms. There are sunflowers. There is tall wheat. I is.

I am haunted by my ghosts, by all that is mythic, fantastic and gigantic: life is supernatural. I walk holding an open umbrella upon a tightrope. I walk to the limit of my great dream. I see the fury of visceral impulses: tortured viscera guide me. I don’t like what I just wrote-but I’m duty-bound to accept the whole because it happened to me. My essence is unconscious of itself that’s why I obey self blindly.

So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word-between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly.

We have ended up in a bizarre situation, in which the government has handed local politicians huge powers to block development but also puts huge pressure on them to build.if Britain had a proper system of local property taxes,&if councils were able to keep the proceeds from new home sales, rather than the money flowing 2the Treasury the local people might begin to see the advantages of building near their backyards.

Much better jobs can be found in advanced engineering firms. But those jobs are already technically complex and are likely to grow ever more so. They will require highly trained workers. When people talk about reviving manufacturing, I sometimes think they envisage high-paying, steady industrial jobs that can be done by people who have just left school with few qualifications. Those jobs have vanished.

those who lament the lack of manufacturing jobs should explain what kind of jobs they are talking about and what skills the jobs will require. There are plenty of factory jobs around Boston in Lincolnshire, which can be done by people without qualifications. Those jobs are repetitive and ill paid, and few Britons want them.

In 2024, the Labour Party won a huge parliamentary majority in an election that was notable for feeble turnout. Just under 60 per cent of eligible voters in Britain cast a ballot, the second-lowest figure for a century. Turnout in places with large working-class populations was especially pitiful: just 47%in Glasgow (Ne); in Rusholme, an ethnically mixed constituency south of Manchester, it was a mere 40%.

2/2 It would be abhorrent to say that young working-class people who rent their homes do not matter. But, politically, they barely matter. Cut benefits for pensioners, and a noisy row will ensue, amplified by newspapers that have many elderly readers. Cut benefits for working-age people on low incomes- Politicians might feel sorry but they do not fear them, because they are unlikely to vote.

1/2 Before the year 2000, a person in the richest fifth of the population was up to ten percentage points more likely to vote than a person in the poorest fifth. Since 2010, the gap has been about twenty percentage points. Other fissures have opened, too. The old, the highly educated and homeowners have become much more likely to vote than the young, the less educated and those who do not own their homes.