History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.