I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.

Sadly, as with so much about history's heroes, it's the spotting of potential fame that's the difficulty, whether it's publishing their poems, hanging their paintings, or buying their old underwear. Think of the great men whose lives passed in penury and hacking coughs due to public unawareness that their littlest possession would end up at Sothebys or the basement at Fort Knox.

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit. ... Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensuously up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the sweet warm beds, kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden, English bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.