La Belle Sauvage is the first in Philip Pulman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust. I got to chapter four in this book, ‘Upsalla’, p56 and gave up.
Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’.
World is crazier and more than we think,
Incorrigably plural…
I don’t know if the italics are Pullman’s or MacNeice’s, but I guess that about sums it up.