The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.

The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.