When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.

It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.