The Amber Spyglass

I spent all day yesterday and into the early hours of the morning finishing that book, then I had a dream in which my French French teacher from France was giving the class some sort of optical experiment involving lenses, and she made me find the amber spyglass.
Three things really interested me whilst reading this book.
Firstly, this quotation by William Blake.
A truth that's told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent.
Which pretty much sums up my life.
Secondly, there was a simile which I can barely recall, which went something like this:
Will and Lyra heard murmuring and crackling, like the sound you hear before you realize your house is on fire.
Which made me think, has Phillip Pullman been inside a burning house? Then, No, that's just a clever simile. But the way it was directed entirely at the reader was odd.
And thirdly, the Authority. He wasn't dead, he hadn't left us, but he was completely senile. He wasn't killed by AEsahaettr the god-destroyer, but a gust of wind.
Oh, and fourthly, which I forgot about. When Mary Malone says the Christian religion is just a well constructed sequence of lies and deceit to keep ignorant people in line, I laughed with her.