John Connolly - The Infernals aka Hell's Bells

8.Lest anyone start getting offended on behalf of women everywhere, let me just stress that vanity is not unique to the fairer sex. “Vanity,” according to the poet and essayist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “is the food of fools;/Yet now and then your men of wit/Will condescend to take a bit.” Vanity can best be defined as taking too much pride in yourself, and the opposite of pride is humility, which means seeing yourself as you are, and not comparing yourself to other people, even bad ones or, indeed, other demons in dresses, should you happen to be a dress-wearing demon yourself.

9.The chancellor is the secretary and adviser to a ruler, or a king. It’s a risky profession, as rulers with great power often tend to react badly to people who try to tell them what to do, or who suggest that they may be wrong about something. Thomas Becket (1118-1170), the chancellor to Henry II of England, was hacked to pieces by knights after he and the king differed over how much power the king should have over the church. Famously, Henry VIII of England had his chancellor, Thomas More (1478-1535), beheaded because More didn’t approve of the king’s desire to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry the younger and prettier Anne Boleyn. Eventually, Henry VIII ended up having Anne Boleyn beheaded too. The lesson to be learned here is not to work for any kings named Henry who seem to have a fondness for lopping off heads. It’s a good idea to watch how they take the tops off their boiled eggs: if they do it with too much ferocity, then it might be a good idea to apply for a job somewhere else.

10.Interestingly, this might be viewed as a variation on a principle of physics known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that there is no way to accurately pinpoint the exact position of a subatomic particle-a very small particle indeed-unless you’re willing to be uncertain about its velocity (its speed in a given direction), and there is no way to accurately pinpoint the particle’s exact velocity unless you’re willing to be uncertain about its position. It makes sense, when you think about it: on a very basic level you can’t tell exactly where something very, very small is if it’s moving. To do that, you’d have to interfere with its motion, thus making your knowledge of that motion more unclear. Similarly, observing its velocity means that the precise position will become more uncertain. Actually, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a bit more complex than that, but that’s the essence of it. Still, if you’re asked if you understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, just say that you’re not sure, which will be considered a very good scientific joke at the right party. Incidentally, Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who formulated the principle, was convinced that it was correct, which makes him someone who was not uncertain about certain uncertainties.

11.And if they get too bright and start wondering if they might not make rather good kings themselves, then you can have them killed. That’s pretty much Rule One of being a king. You learn that on the first day.

12.Truculent is a lovely word. It essentially means to be very self-assertive and destructive. This perfectly described Mr. Merryweather’s dwarfs, who could have given lessons in aggression to Vikings.

13.Spiggit’s Old Peculiar had recently been the subject of a number of court cases relating to incidents of temporary blindness, deafness, and undesirable hair growth on the palms of the hands. Due to a loophole in the law, it was allowed to remain on sale but it was required to have a warning label on the bottle, and anyone buying the ale had to sign a one-off agreement promising not to sue in the event of any injury caused by imbibing it, up to and including death. Spiggit’s had decided to make the best of this and its advertising slogan now read: “Spiggit’s-Ask for the Beer with the Biohazard Symbol!”

14.See what I did there? Comedy gold.

15.The English writer Horace Walpole (1717-1797) suggested that “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Unfortunately, since most of us both think and feel, we are destined to spend a lot of our time on Earth not being certain whether to laugh or cry. Laughter is probably better, but you don’t want to be one of those people who laugh all of the time (“Look, that chap over there’s just fallen off a cliff! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) because you’ll appear uncaring, or insane. Similarly, if you cry all of the time then you’ll look like a sissy, or a professional mourner, and you’ll start to smell damp. Best to settle for a wry smile, then, the kind that suggests you’re able to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a degree of grace while still being able to shed a discreet tear at sad films and funerals. Incidentally, Horace Walpole looked a bit like a horse in a wig, and was once accused of driving the poet Chatterton to suicide. He was, therefore, probably a “world as tragedy” kind of person.

16.If you’re bored sometime, and want to puzzle your parents:

1) Fill a small plastic glass with a little water.

2) Lift said glass as if to drink from it.

3) Bypass your mouth and instead touch the glass to your forehead.

4) Spill a little of the water down your face.

5) Tell your parents that you thought you were taller.

6) Take a bow. Ask people to tip their waitress. Tell them you’ll be here all week.

7) Leave.

17.Actually, we have a tendency to take our reflection for granted at the best of times, when it’s really quite extraordinary. When you see your reflection in a window at night, perhaps with a city visible through the glass beyond, it’s because 95 percent of the light striking the window has gone straight through while 5 percent has been reflected, hence the ghostly image of your face. This proves the particle nature of light, but what’s troubling is that the 5 percent of particles of energy, or photons, that create your image are reflected for no particularly good reason that we can understand, indicating the possibility of randomness at the heart of the universe. There’s a one-in-twenty chance that a photon will be reflected instead of transmitted, which means that we can’t know for certain how a given photon will behave. This is very troubling for scientists. If you want to give your science teacher a nervous breakdown, ask why this happens.

18.It was the great scientist Albert Einstein who discovered that matter can be changed to energy, and energy to matter, as in an atomic explosion. His discovery was based upon the work of the physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, who produced the world’s first artificial nuclear disintegration in 1932, and their work in turn contributed to the creation of the LHC. Thus, it’s really the law of conservation of energy and matter. But one of the forgotten pioneers in this area is the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), who, in his spare time, became fascinated by the possibility that all of the bits and pieces of stuff on Earth-lions, tigers, budgerigars, trees, slugs, iron, and the like-were parts of a single interconnected whole. He and his wife, Marie Anne, began rusting pieces of metal in a sealed apparatus, then weighing them along with the air that was lost. They found that the rusted metal, rather than weighing less than before, or the same, in fact weighed more, because the oxygen molecules in the air had adhered to the metal. In other words, matter was changing from one form to another, but not disappearing. Lavoisier met a terrible end: he had offended a frustrated scientist, Jean-Paul Marat, and during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794) that followed the French Revolution, Marat, who was prominent in the Reign, got his revenge: Lavoisier was tried, sentenced, and then beheaded, all in one day. When a plea for mercy was entered on his behalf, the judge responded: “The Republic has no need of geniuses.” The next time that you burn a match, spare a thought for Lavoisier.