Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised.

Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.

A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.

You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.

Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making.

I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.