The most impressive here is "Ocean Symphony (Dirge for the Fiji Mermaid)" (2007), with the main attraction being a set of five wall-size video projections.
He starts out seemingly constrained by genre conventions, boundaries of what his story should or could be — these conventions being a set of tacit assumptions about the world and his place in it.
Michael Pakenham, who had been the Sun's book editor, and had also worked with Carroll at the Inquirer, said, "He had a profound sense of the newspaper being a set of integrated parts, but the parts had to be made excellent on their own.
Another section is a variant of the Words Misunderstood chapter, or movement, of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a set of 63 aphoristic definitions (published in the Guardian last week), some of which are simply or largely quotations from the novels, and many of which are revealing.
Jane Stevenson Richard Mabey's Beechcombings (Chatto & Windus), an exploration of our relationship with trees which gives the impression of being a set of merely personal musings and turns out to contain some wonderfully subversive, far-reaching and unsentimental thinking about man and nature.
McKay had a tip for Conway; he suggested that it might be worthwhile exploring a mathematical commodity that had recently attracted interest: the Leech lattice (discovered by the University of Stirling's John Leech) – the best lattice for a sphere packing in 24 dimensions, with the "lattice" being a set of points derived from the centres of the spheres.
