Quotes & Highlights

Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B. Alpern (C. Hurst & Co., London, 1998),

Wennerström was devoting himself to fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal—it was business.

You can tell that when he was young he’d been the kind of good-looking that made girls forget about their boyfriends for the night and made guys want to punch him in the face on principle.

Barrow’s Super-Ego was standing on his Ego’s shoulders and bellowing through the air vent to the bridge, “We are in big trouble unless you do something, you hairy oaf! Fight or flight! Fight or flight!” Id wasn’t listening, naturally. He just sat in the captain’s chair with an unseemly tent in his jockey shorts and looked foolishly deep into Layla’s eyes, perfect pools of enchanting quicksand from which few escaped.

“With all the best will in the world, Johannes, you’re as much fun as a leper at an orgy.”

One was short and greasy. The other was taller, and looked like his mother had been scared—scared quite badly—by a scabby vulture.

humourless gravitas of an Old Testament prophet