Philip seemed really to be born again. He breathed the circumambient air as though he had never breathed it before, and he took a child's pleasure in all the facts of the world.

For millennia we have tried to fathom it: via selenography and selenomancy, poetry and algebra, robots and rockets.

The village women were bad enough, but this man looked through me, past all the walls I had built to protect myself from pain. I do not think I could have hidden anything from him, even with a lifetime's practice of hiding what I felt.

On the catwalk, in magazines, on the legs of industry muses such as Jethro Cave (son of Nick), meggings are everywhere.