Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.