Author: Alex Gray

Cites

• Edwin Brock (1)
  • IN: Five Ways to Kill a Man (2010) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this properly you require a crowd of people wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one man to hammer the nails home. Or you can take a length of steel, shaped and chased in a traditional way, and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears. But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, at least two flags, a prince, and a castle to hold your banquet in. Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind allows, blow gas at him. But then you need a mile of mud sliced through with ditches, not to mention black boots, bomb craters, more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs and some round hats made of steel. In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly miles above your victim and dispose of him by pressing one small switch. All you then require is an ocean to separate you, two systems of government, a nation's scientists, several factories, a psychopath and land that no-one needs for several years. These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
    FROM: Five Ways to Kill a Man, (1990), Poem, UK
• Bible (1)
  • IN: A Pound of Flesh (2012) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: What do you think a man does who has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost? He will leave the other ninety-nine grazing hillside and go and look for the lost sheep. When he finds it, I tell you, he feels, happier over this one sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not get lost. In just the same way your father in heaven does not want any of these little ones to be lost.
    FROM: Bible, Luke 18: 12-14, (100), Bible, NULL
• NULL (1)
  • IN: The Bird that Did Not Sing (2014) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: This is the bird that never flew This is the tree that never grew This is the bell that never sang This is the fish that never swam
    FROM: Legend of the Glasgow Coat of Arms, (None), Poem, UK
• William Shakespeare (1)
  • IN: Sleep Like The Dead (2011) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
    FROM: The Tempest, (1623), Play, UK