Meetings ... are rather like cocktail parties. You don't want to go, but you're cross not to be asked.

Leo, sadly, has Parkinsons, but he used to cook all sorts of dazzling things.

I was so flattered that someone wanted me to write a book, I said I would. It was published in 1969.

The memo's chief function ... is as a track-coverer, so that you can turn on someone six months later and snarl: 'Well, you should have known about it, I sent you a memo.

in a village you can't sack or fight with someone, as you'll find yourself stuck beside them in the hairdresser's next morning.

People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried.

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.