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.

SCIENCE: a way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong.

Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien's attic.

Your whole life passes in front of your eyes before you die. This is called living.

Jesus won't cut you off before you're through With him you won't never get a crossed line, And when your bill comes it'll all be properly itemised He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life. The phone line to the saviour's always free of interference He's in at any hour, day or night And when you call J-E-S-U-S you always call toll-free He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life.

Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.

Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.