Being solitary isn’t a disease that needs a cure.

It was embarrassing to be associated with a man who thought Newton was a town.

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said ‘do not walk on the grass’, one hopped. Anybody who didn’t had failed to understand what Oxford was.

My uncle is a phrenologist and says that the shape of his skull is typical of a liar.

Chivalry – Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it’s a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you’d feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don’t say it to grown-ups.

I’m a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don’t.

People shouldn’t be throwing away their history when it’s still doing archery practice forty miles up the road.

She felt suddenly as though she had thrown a stone, badly aimed, but still a stone, at a navy sniper.

Under the gas lamps, mist pawed at the windows of the closed shops, which became steadily shabbier nearer home. It was such a smooth ruination that he could have been walking forward through time, watching the same buildings age five years with every step, all still as a museum.

Irony was a difficult thing to catch in a new language, and more so because not all languages had it, not even all local languages.