“[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.”

Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.

Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!

You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.

Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?

It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.

I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.