Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself. - Peter Greenaway

I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.

This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.

Are animals like car-crashes -- Acts of God or mere Accidents -- bizarre, tragic, farcical, plotted nowadays into a scenario by an ingenious storyteller, Mr C Darwin?