Simon Taylor

they insisted on knowing the story of the voices. They wanted her to name, embody and describe them in ways they could understand, with recognisable … imagery and emotions, in a conventional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof. … It seems that for her the voices had no story. And

That was the sense we had in the work on the Enemy, as we did later in the Burrow, where the Enemy seemed to split asunder and reproduce, invading from all sides – the body so besieged, it seemed to be divested of any power to resist. … So, fear of surprise,

The life of a group is, by the nature of the thing, in a nervously transient state. … In the sociology of institutions, it is held that groups do not move irreversibly deathward as individuals do. But continuity is also a function of number, that is, the size of an institution

It is obvious that Robinson, on his desert island, could reconstruct an analogue of society only by giving himself, all at once, all the rules and laws which are reciprocally implicated, even when they still have no objects. The conquest of nature is, on the contrary, progressive, partial, and advances

– photograph by Jo Larkin, rm. 3104, 2007

The pucker of an old bullet wound on her right shoulder. … She wasn’t attractive, but she was plain in the way history is plain, its contrivance lending the world a symmetry that implies hidden beauty; and it seemed to him that her impassivity was symptomatic of the quiet confidence