In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.

Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.

A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.