It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away.

It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

It was lovely to see cynicism in one so young. It positively restored his faith in human nature.

Tell them I have the headache--no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.

Miles was still mourning the loss of his Romantic Plan. 'There was going to be champagne, and oysters, and you' - he held out both hands as though shifting a piece of furniture - 'were going to be sitting there, and I was going to get down on one knee, and...and...