Tom’s Reviews > The Crow Road > Status Update

'I still like the idea of just being a historian.... you know, ideally. But that means staying in academia and I'm not sure that's what I want. Somehow I don't think they let you go straight from graduation into prime-time TV with a twenty-six part dramatised history of the world.' - more's the pity.

'The good lawyer Blawke opined that the will was perfectly legal; under Scottish law, a hand-written will did not have to be witnessed. He even came out and looked at it personally, which made two visits in one week. Truly our cup of honour ranneth over.'

'People dressed in black and looked sombre. They had thin, tight lips, and they sometimes wept, and there was a lot of grim clutching of other people's shoulders, and low mutterings about how so-and-so had been a good person, and that sort of thing. But under it all was a simple joyous fact: they were dead and you weren't yet!'

"Bye-bye, Prentice."
"Try not to fall in love with anybody else before tonight."
"Yo."

'They danced, they kissed, they walked by the quiet harbour where the boats lay still on the water like black oil, and they sauntered hand-in-hand along the esplanade beneath a moon-devoid sky full of bright stars. They each talked about their dreams, and about travelling to far-away places. He asked if she had given any thought to maybe coming back here some time? Like next weekend for example?' Lmao.

'The world and his life were opening up before him and he wanted to take full advantage ... apart from anything else there was always the Bomb, that lurking presence forever threatening to close it all back down again with one final, filthy splash of light that heralded the long darkness, and made a nonsense of any human plan, any dream for the future. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we blow up the world.

"The Wombles, Mr McHoan, of Wimbledon Common, are they real?"

"No Darren they're not real; the real creatures on the real Wimbledon Common are mice and birds and maybe foxes and badgers, and none of them wear clothes and live in nice well-lit burrows with furniture. A lady made up the Wombles and made up stories about them..."

"See, ah told ye" Darren said, shaking his little brother's hand... Dean started to cry.

'The stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowels: the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the libid in libidinous!'