The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.

Happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.

Several sellers of hot meat pies and sausages in a bun had appeared from nowhere and were doing a brisk trade. [Footnote: They always do, everywhere. No-one sees them arrive. The logical explaination is that the franchise includes the stall, the paper hat and a small gas-powered time machine.]

Oh dear me, the Booker people don't like me. I don't care. I have been given an award for being taken not seriously, and I am very, very pleased about that.

Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.

You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.