“One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.”

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.

It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.

Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.

Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.