I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.

He’s bound to have done something,” Nobby repeated. In this he was echoing the Patrician’s view of crime and punishment. If there was a crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned by no later than the date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.That would do it every time.

In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

When you stand between two mirrors you're spread out among the images, your whole soul is pulled out thin, and somewhere in the distant images a dark part of you might get out and come looking for you, if you aren't careful.