Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the last. This is called Finals, the very name of which implies that nothing of importance can happen after it.

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.