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

it's a good idea to wait a few months before joining anything when you arrive at a village. A bookseller friend who retired to nearby Oxfordshire, and was worried he might be bored, got himself on to every village committee in the first six months, and spent the next ten years extricating himself.

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

There is something infinitely dingy about the word workshop. Pray that England doesn't become a nation of workshopkeepers.

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.

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.