Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.

For many years I had an impression of my golf swing, which was that I vividly resembled Tom Weiskopf in the takeaway and Dave Marr on the downswing. Unfortunately, there came a day when I was invited to have my golf swing filmed via a video camera. Something I will never do again. When it was played back, what I saw - what you would have seen - was not Weiskopf and Marr but a man simultaneously climbing into a sweater and falling out of a tree.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.

I hasten to say to snobs from the Surrey pine-and-sand country that no invention since the corn plaster or the electric toothbrush has brought greater balm to the extremities of the senior golfer than the golfmobile, a word that will have to do for want of a better.

These doomsday warriors look no more like soldiers than the soldiers of the Second World War looked like conquistadors. The more expert they become the more they look like lab assistants in small colleges