Congealed fat is pretty much the same, irrespective of the delicacy around which it is concealed.

Wine buffs write and talk as though the food and wine will be in your mouth at the same time, that one is there to be poured over the other. This is bullshit. Gustatory enjoyment comes from food and wine and cigars of your liking. So far no one has said that a Monte Cristo is the only cigar to smoke after Armagnac, Romeo and Juliet after Calvados ... but the time may yet come.

Breakfast is a notoriously difficult meal to serve with a flourish.

In moments of considerable strain, I tend to take to bread-and-butter pudding. There is something about the blandness of soggy bread, the crispness of the golden outer crust and the unadulterated pleasure of a lightly set custard that makes the world seem a better place to live.

If anyone tells me I'm fat, I say, - That's because every time I make love to your wife, she gives me a biscuit

I think our police are excellent, probably because I have not done anything that has occasioned being beaten up by these good men.

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.