“Somebody doesn’t know they’re not in Kansas anymore,’ said Stephanopoulos.”

The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

What do you think you’re doing?

What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?’ I asked. ‘That would be a tiger,’said Nightingale. ‘Well don’t tell Greenpeace,’ I said. ‘They’re an endagered species.’ ‘Not that sort of tiger,’ said Nightingale. ‘

If you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth.

Are they really gods?” “I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace – that makes them a police matter.

The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn’t set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.

My dad was a fairy,” said Zach. “And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.

The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you’ve generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life – like drinking and sleeping, and if you’re lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.

Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.

…don’t ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let’s just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park – it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

The media are doing this, not because they have a sinister motive, but because they love to feel that they are influencing events. That’s why they hate politicians so much, because politicians have direct power and they do not.

I have an affinity for Africa, especially East Africa, and Kansas looks very much like that.

Like every other place, I guess, Kansas City was quite a different city when I was a youngster there. They had quite a few clubs, and we had what we used to call jam sessions every night.

I’m from Kansas, so there were a lot of vacant lots and open fields to tackle each other in so we could avoid tackling each other on the street. But running on the street and trying not to get taken down on the concrete, that will make you fast, that’s for sure.