“Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”

His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.

Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

A book, as it were, closes the book.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.

The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.

I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

Brian Mulroney, myself, [and] Rajiv Gandhi; I think that was the real core [of the Commonwealth ]. That was the engine room, I reckon.

[ Elizabeth II] has immersed herself, in the sense [that] she can speak intelligently about any and all members of the Commonwealth and she has played a role.

One other thing: at the meeting in Canada, [there was] the coup in Fiji. This comes to an important part of the Commonwealth: the role of the Queen [Elizabeth II]. I had absolutely just enormous respect for her as leader of the Commonwealth.

As far as we’re concerned, there was no sporting organisation [that] should have anything to do with the sport in South Africa.

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire; of societies old and new; of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God’s Will, united in spirit and in aim.

This is my last Commonwealth Games. Five CWG and nine medals, it is enough for me.

Laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt