Hangover cure: Rigorous sex, hydration, hot bath, then "go up for half an hour in an open aeroplane. (needless to say, with a non-hungover person at the controls)."

We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.

It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.

When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out.

You'll find that marriage is a good short cut to the truth. No, not quite that. A way of doubling back to the truth. Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion aren't those of adolescense, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. Your age, by the way, Jim. That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery like that can't help knocking you off balance for a time.

I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.

A German wine label is one of the things life's too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation's love of detail and organization.