A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.

Israel also deprived the world of its chance of shedding tears of genuine sympathy over her destruction. The world resents this; it likes to feel noble and sympathetic.

The British are proud of their ability to create a muddle and then muddle through all difficulties. I must shake the British pride: muddle is not an exclusively British institution. Read descriptions, for instance, of the over-organized, wonderfully systematic and "thorough" German war machine during the last war.

Long before the word Zionism was uttered for the first time, old religious Jews came from all over the world to die in Jerusalem. It is the finest place to die in - it has always been acknowledged. It has a joie de mourir quite its own.

Once you start buying first aid kits you start having accidents.

The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science, their labour bore fruit.

Japan is, you often feel, an improved version of the United States.