We're such a small bump in the road that driving through Sylvester is like hitting an armadillo at 60 miles an hour, drawls local businessman David Register.

Another Autumn, for instance, is a series of one-line sketches — a feathering of the ink whereby characters lose definition is followed by overlapping windowscreens, one pattern interfering with another, which is in turn followed by sideways, all the politeness, all that irony, trying for a draw (an echo of a line from A Pillow-Book, a much earlier O'Brien poem).

Archie was an artist, finely chiselled, the type girls go for like catnip. He . . . was expected to marry an American heiress. But she loved a muscular curate with a face that would stop a clock.

Both the connection between the two bills and the capitulatory nature of the first were publicly and strongly denounced by Khomeini, who saw them as signs of bondage to the United States.