As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.

You don't want to make an enemy of Piers Morgan.

To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person.

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.