Irritable Judges suffer from a bad case of premature adjudication.

I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.

No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails.

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

On the three pigs he and his wife own: "We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn’t want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.

The people look forbidding, solemn, marked by that impossible ideal, Communism, which, like Christianity, seemed to demand too much of humanity and, falling into the wrong hands, led too easily to horrible brutality.

I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce a l'Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is.