"Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words."
"Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then."
"Like many men who play tennis, when I hit a ball into the net, I tend to look daggers at my racket, reproaching it for playing so badly when I myself have been trying so hard."
"One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun."
"It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril."
"My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day."
"There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing."
"The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common."
"Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued."
"Tweeting is the go-to medium for the show-off and the shyster."
"I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too."
"For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news."
"When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why."
"The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house."
"Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it."
"In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life."
"Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one."
"As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish."
"You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety."
"Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private."
"More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences."
"One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions."
"More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average."
"The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible."
"Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how."
