To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.

There is always time for failure

Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyalty to Selfridges.

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors' surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.

The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.

No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.