The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.