It wasn't until some time later that I realized that, without it being one of the most momentous encounters in western literature, my mother had met T. S. Eliot. I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. 'The thing is,' I said finally, 'he won the Nobel Prize.' 'Well,' she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, 'I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.'

Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-…

He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about.