Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.

I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.

One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.