Vergil would have seen the queues himself, people summoned by privy seal or letter, or waiting to pay installments of their fines […]

From Daqing we took the train to the far north of China at Qiqihaer, described to me as a relatively small Chinese city of about six million people!

The standard process by which aristocratic identity is established as the product of ancestry, evidenced in the douzepers’ flamboyant display of their coats of arms, is replicated when Florent dons Clement’s body armour, his weapons, his boar’s-head crested helmet, and his shield, emblazoned with its own craft-inspired heraldic insignia (five of the butcher’s trademark pole-axes), all of which are credited with a robust (war- and weather-beaten) pedigree. A discussion of Octavian.

A thousand demons lurk within the lee.