He was laughing again. What was it about Bird that made him do that?

He felt like a man trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of live pieces, that moved and changed shape at random intervals with tiny malicious giggles.

Back in our tutorials, Truss demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise. No other student matched her mischievous ability to read out essays on any number of the main events in British political history which always managed to say something new; not always accurate, but definitely new.
These essays were creative and self-consciously unconventional. As we argued over the hour, she almost never backed down, even when I did what all Oxford tutors try to do and present fact after fact to try to change her mind.

She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.