The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.