The modern Aussie is a townie through and through. Australia is the least densely populated country on earth; it is also among the most highly urbanised.

Knowing the nisbas of the litigants and their representatives was the qāḍī's single most important preliminary task.

After cataloguing all the Canterburians' 'tyrannical maxims', Baillie triumphantly concluded by exposing Laud's alleged hypocrisy, quoting a passage from the archbishop's Conference with the Jesuit Fisher (1639) wherein Laud had argued that 'the Statute Lawes which must bind all the Subjects, cannot be made but in, and by Parliament: the supreme Magistrate in the civill state, may not abrogate Lwes made in Parliament.'

I had never realized how womanly his lips are — a female reptile's razor slit, pursing in an unlizardlike way.