Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonised expulsion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots.

It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

It was a silver cow. But when I say 'cow', don't go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence.

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.

A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them.

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.