"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

Neal Stephenson was starting to lose me a bit with all the political intrigue. (In one scene, the Dutch ambassador talked about Belgian waffles and cleavages and 'negateev spaace', and Daniel finally got it - 'You're making a point about the Spanish Netherlands!' But we don't quite get it.) Luckily, Jack and Eliza came on the scene and action picked up. One high point is the surviving Shaftoe brothers' Newgate performance, with the help of a wig they'd stolen 'at appalling risk'.

• Roger... said, "Poh! You could no more show up at Whitehall without a mistress , than at a duel without a sword! Come, Daniel! No one will take you seriously! They'll think you're hiding something!"
• An open Bible was laid in front of them, and they recited these lines (the first bit of the 51st Psalm). Which, by the evidentiary standards then prevailing in English courts, proved that they could read. Which proved that they were clergymen. Which rendered them beyond the reach of the criminal courts; ...the mudlarks were sent free.
• (They) packed the mines with black powder, and blown them up, creating avalanches where walls had stood - as when molten wax spills from the top of a candle and mars its regular shape with a lumpy cataract. Fresh trenches, then, had been cut across those irregular debris-piles, bringing the Turks into a position whence they could bring musketry to bear on the city walls, to protect their sappers and miners as they advanced, ditch by ditch, across the dry moat. ... But it was a gradual sort of war, like watching a tree absorb a stone fence.
• He'd supposed, until moments ago, that it had already come: namely, when he decided to mount the horse and ride after the ostrich. But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious.
• He learned that Mummy had been sold into the harem of an Ottoman military official at the Qasbah of Algiers, and in her copious spare time had founded the Society of Britannic Abductees, which now had branches in Morocco, Tripoli, Bizerta, and Fez; which met on a fortnightly rotation except during Ramadan; which had bylaws running to several hundred pages.
  

<<