“Soapy Sam looked as though he had just sat down on a favourite armchair which had gone missing.”

“On the cover of this publication a bikini-clad young woman disported herself with a medicine ball, both articles looking as though they had been inflated with a bicycle pump.”

“He is a pale, long faced, unsmiling fellow who probably lives on a diet of organic bran and carrot juice. He heard Ballard open the proceedings against La Maison with a pained expression, and looked at me over his half-glasses as though I were a saucepan that hadn't been washed up properly.”

“A hundred pounds! He couldn't remember ever having seen a hundred pounds, all at one time. He found himself envying his father, who had nothing to worry about except the future of mankind.”

“This soirée was followed by a longer and more serious session in Pommeroy's, which had ended once again, I regret to say, with Henry and me recalling the great hits of Dame Vera Lynn. So now I turned my face to the wall, closed my eyes and knew what it was like to stand on the edge of eternity.”

“He's a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I'm a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?”

“The people look forbidding, solemn, marked by that impossible ideal, Communism, which, like Christianity, seemed to demand too much of humanity and, falling into the wrong hands, led too easily to horrible brutality.”