Craig Brown

“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.”

“The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house.”

“Personally, I belong to the speedy school of golf. If it were left up to me, I would introduce a new rule that said every golf ball has to stay in motion from the moment it leaves the tee to the moment it plops into the hole, thus obliging each player to run along after his ball and give it another whack before it stops rolling.”

“All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.”

“It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.”

“There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.”

“By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.”

“Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.”

“More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.”

“In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.”

“A decent beard has long been the number one must-have fashion item for any fugitive from justice.”

“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.”

“For some reason, it is always thrilling to spot your home town in the news.”

“Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.”

“Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.”

“When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.”

“Many people see the chance to eat something for nothing, without the need to cook or wash up, as the great consolation of going out to dinner. But they forget quite how difficult it is to talk to a stranger and eat at the same time.”