Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'

It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.

Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

The point is that if a book that had been published three years ago started to sell twice as many all of a sudden it probably wouldn't even get no­ticed. People wouldn't be tracking it. The system has cleaned up its act an awful lot but the best-seller list system is not an entirely foolproof thing.

Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often students, for heaven's sake.

Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?

His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.