I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.

There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie's prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.