I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed - or worse, expelled. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to bed.

In the end, love wins. It does win. We know it wins. When a person dies, love isn’t turned off like a faucet. It is an amazingly resilient part of us.

I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

Failure is not fun. It can be awful. But living so cautiously that you never fail is worse.

Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.

Ron's eyebrows rose so high that they were in danger of disappearing into his hair.

The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.