When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

I'm convinced England's overflowing with eccentric people, places, happenings. Indeed, you might say eccentricity's normal in England.

Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven.

Time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty.

Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.

There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

Well, my paper has asked me to do a series: Lives of the Great Musicians, reading time 2 minutes.