What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.