"The drive home was the point of it all ... fifty to sixty miles an hour through the empty streets of South London ... slamming in the gears, accelerating on every turn ... my brain finally clean and white, washed out by the danger and the roar of the wind ... in the few villages along the way I pulled every trick I could think of to make up for the slower speeds ... to maintain the speed and streak through the dark world." Prologue

"...above all, filtering down through the whole school, the excitement of the 'new thing', of the experiment - that peculiar floating sensation of not knowing what's going to happen next." p. 13

"Although Ligget's beating is part of my life ... and although I've worried about it off and on for years, all I can say about it is that brutality happens easily. I learned almost nothing from beating up...