It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.

We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.