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.

Go to lots of interviews, at least one a month even when you don't need a job, to keep in training for when you do.

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.

I'm not wild about holidays. They always seem a ludicrously expensive way of proving there's no place like home.

The male - I have found - is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.

Always be nice to everyone in the firm on the way up. You never know who you may meet on the way down.

The aristocrat, when he wants to, has very good manners. The Scottish upper classes, in particular, have that shell-shocked look that probably comes from banging their heads on low beams leaping to their feet whenever a woman comes into the room. Aristocrats are also deeply male chauvinist, and ... on the whole they tend to be reactionary.