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.

The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.

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

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.

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