Black Swan Green: List 4

It sells conch shells with titchy red bulbs inside, but they were £4.75 and blowing all my money on one souvenir'd've been daft.

Each one's got a different dinosaur, but if you put them end to end in order, the background landscape joins up and forms a frieze.

I floundered for a killer put-down line without any stammer words in it. And floundered, and floundered.

This young guy had a metallicky suit and a paisley tie.

One mo, just let me unpin this absurd name badge.... I'm a man, me, not a self-adhesive strip of letters embossed on a Dymo label printer...

Ah, but isn't this the life now, eh? Downright sadistic of Greenland to be holding their training conferences in a spot like this.

Accuracy on matters Irish are not the forte of the English.

Along the promenade, strings of boiled-fruit lights lit up.

"Wiggsy,” Danny lobbed back, "you're a drunken sot and a reprobate and you cheat at squash. Why would anyone want to be seen dead in public with yourself?”

"Wiggsy,” Danny lobbed back, "you're a drunken sot and a reprobate and you cheat at squash. Why would anyone want to be seen dead in public with yourself?”

If anyone's sold you this fossil as anything but a trilobite, sue 'em.

Her father. The pig. The dolt. Who else put the idea into her head?

“Cherries are the fruit. Pop 'em in, slide out the stone, masticate, swallow, finito. None of this...spatter and gore.”

Some duchess with a big country house has died. Or a countess. Or a largesse.

A thief has just put a pair of rather valuable Australian opals in her bag. Obviously, I need to protect my stock. The thief wants to escape with her stolen goods. So we have an impasse.

Neal Brose looked at me like you'd look at a dog taken to the vet's to be put down. Pity, but contempt, too, that it'd allowed itself to get so weak.

I spent the game near enough to the ball to not get done for malingering, but far enough to avoid having to touch it.

“The footbridge, I meant, you cretins! By the tennis courts! Why would I send you off to Upton? Unsupervised?”

“Mr. McNamara, is this child your main offender, your chief suspect, or a recalcitrant informer?”

What I care about is that Mr. McNamara, a guest in our school, will report to his peers—with just cause—that I am the headmaster of a zoo of hooligans. For this affront to my reputation, I shall punish every one of you.

In a more enlightened age, a sound thrashing would have taught you a sense of decorum. But as our masters at Westminster have deprived us of this tool, other, more onerous techniques must be found.

“‘And another thing. We ought to have more rules. Where the conch is, that's a meeting. The sssame up here as down there.’ They—”

“That is despicably, fatuously, ignorantly weak of you, Gary Drake.”

Namely, that the putative crème de la crème impart their enriching essence to the milkier orders.

I quite fail to see what is 'good’ about this afternoon, when you have rubbished the founding principle of the comprehensive school. Namely, that the putative crème de la crème impart their enriching essence to the milkier orders.

“Moonlight Sonata," the poshest voice on earth told us, is one of the best-loved pieces in any pianist's repertoire.

Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.

Let guile be your ally.

“Hunting for a needle in the ocean?” Mr. Dunwoody's head appeared round his partition. “As the Asiatics might say? In lieu of a haystack?”

“It could be halitosis. The chemist in Upton could give you something for it, if it is.”

“Why should decent-minded citizens like layabouts who pay nothing to the state and flout every planning regulation in the book?”

“And how much”—Dad wasn't backing off—“did this vagrant rip you off for?”

Forty caravans, they've earmarked land for. Forty they say but there’ll be hundreds of 'em once it's built, once you add on their relatives an' hangers-onners.

That not a single councilor bothered to appear this evening is less than edifying proof....of their duplicity, cowardice, and the weakness of their case.

That not a single councilor bothered to appear this evening is less than edifying proof....of their duplicity, cowardice, and the weakness of their case.

“Before we begin, the committee wishes to welcome Mr. Hughes of the Malvern Gazetteer”—a man in the front row with a notepad nodded—“for slotting us into his busy diary. We trust his report of the outrage being perpetrated by those criminals at Malvern Council will reflect his newspaper's reputation for fair play.”

Country people we may be, but by golly yokels that you can hoodwink we are jolly well not!

West Brom're always getting relegated, but Dean and his dad've always supported West Brom and that's that.

The battle spilt this way and that, so close to my hiding place I heard Simon Sinton mumble instructions to himself. The bus shelter I'd left twenty seconds ago was requisitioned as a bunker.

The wolf who'd robbed me lolloped out of the dark.