There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.

Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

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