“Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.”

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.

Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.

It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.

There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn’t all the water gush out when you get in?

Why they emigrated is not exactly clear, but many scholars believe it was because they saw the way Sweden was going, i.e. neutral.

But even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.

Kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden.

I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.

All I know of birds to this date is that sparrows are the ones that are not pigeons.

Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.

The Act of God designation on all insurance policies; which means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.

10.30 Newsnight: What Are The Chances Of World War Three Breaking Out After You Have Gone To Bed?

Jacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren’t called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)

Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensuously up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the sweet warm beds.