Novelists From England

"Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence."

"“Twenty-five years ago he was executed.” It shocked me. “Executed?” I said. “For what?” The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. “The usual—corruption on earth.” “I’m sorry, but what exactly does ‘corruption on earth’ mean?” He laughed. “Pretty much whatever we want.” Nearly all of his team found it funny too. “In this case,” he continued, “it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal.”"

"Apart from opium poppies and hemp plants, kidnappings for ransom had become about the only growth industry in Afghanistan."

"The Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip—the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims but they were also men. Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly, and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man—a less religious and a more humane man—might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen—the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God."

"In the Army, as in life, sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention."

"DNA doesn’t lie."

"The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used."

"By this stage I had switched my patronage to AA—as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings and I had decided that if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained."

"He came toward me and I realized I was being given the singular honor denied to so many dictators and mass murderers—I was going to be thrown out of a Swiss bank."

"I mean, there’s no better alibi than being dead, is there?"

"Several guards and retainers exchanged a glance—Gaza was not somewhere to be taken lightly; it was probably the only place in the world that made Afghanistan look safe."

"I have heard people say love is weak, but they’re wrong—love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things—patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love—the epic and the small, the noble and the base—the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I’ll be forever grateful I did—some years later, deep in the ruins called the Theater of Death, it salvaged everything."

"Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them."

"Despite its huge wealth, vast oil reserves, and love of high-tech American ornaments, nothing really works in Saudi Arabia."

"If only—but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good."

"With each step his desperation grew—maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe—"

"Soft speech Provençal under the olives! Like a queen’s raiment from days long perish’d, Breathing aromas of old unremember’d Perfumes and shining in dust-cover’d places With sudden hints of forgotten splendour— So on the lips of the peasant his language, His only now, the tongue of the peasant."

"Here in the country’s heart Where the grass is green, Life is the same sweet life As it e’er hath been.Trust in a God still lives, And the bell at morn Floats with a thought of God O’er the rising corn.God comes down in the rain, And the crop grows tall— This is the country faith, And the best of all."

"Benny Hill once honoured me with a sketch in which I was sent up as eager-beaver "girl reporter Linseed Cranks". Being naive – another period indicator – I was given to wonderful boo-boos such as innocently asking the wife of the Swedish ambassador if her husband had big balls. ("Give, dear! Or throw!" my hilarious colleagues shouted at me for a week.)"

"I must stress, because a lot of people won't credit it, that it was revolutionary in those days for women to be seen onscreen in news programmes, and we "girl reporters" – there were just two of us – became minor celebrities. ... But we did pioneer new techniques of interviewing, including the vox-pop, where we buttonholed people in the street for their opinions (much to their alarm, at first – they thought we were trying to pick them up. Later we'd be mobbed by people avid to be on telly)."

"Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll all work out in the end."

"Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity."

"Isn't it fascinating that probably the only laugh this man will ever get in his life is by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings."

"Can you imagine being wonderfully over-paid for dressing up and playing games?"

"Sharpe is one of England's funniest writers. He's in the tradition of the 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote novels of ideas laced with physical, slapstick farce."

"They have more luck than bulls"

"Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and Vintage Stuff are books that hark back to a golden age of academic dottiness, of the kind that has all but disappeared since the 1940s when Sharpe himself was a student."

"President Bush doesn’t need toilet paper. He has Blair"

"Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked."

"I am in favour of foxhunting because foxes kill chickens"

"When I was a fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye – such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based."

"Fifty miles away, Lord Lynchknowle’s dinner had been interrupted by the arrival of a police car and the news of his daughter’s death. The fact that it had come between the mackerel pâté and the game pie, and on the wine side, an excellent Montrachet and a Château Lafite 1962, several bottles of which he’d opened to impress the Home Secretary and two old friends from the Foreign Office, particularly annoyed him. Not that he intended to let the news spoil his meal by announcing it before he’d finished, but he could foresee an ugly episode with his wife afterwards for no better reason than that he had come back to the table with the rather unfortunate remark that it was nothing important. Of course, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that hospitality came first, and old Freddie was the Home Secretary after all, and he wasn’t going to let that Lafite ’62 go to waste, but somehow he knew Hilary was going to kick up the devil of a fuss about it afterwards."

"'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'"

"All is fair in love, war and tax evasion."

"The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and churchwardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country."

"Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money."

"There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk."

"The authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State."

"Even half an hour after reading Tom Sharpe's 14th novel, it's difficult to remember what happened in it. ... Wilt is a victim of our times, and Sharpe doesn't seem to like them much. ... Sharpe might be happier in another age – the 18th century, perhaps – but even then he'd find plenty to rail against. It's tempting to see him as a contemporary Smollett: his plots are guided by whatever vices he feels like including, or whatever images are in his head."

"I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials. ... There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with cream."

"The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "" to Motor Mechanics."

"While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact."

""Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools."

"By shooting your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house."

"If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal."

"I understand now why, if you are in an emotionally abusive relationship, how difficult it can feel to speak up or escape it [...] Part of the abuse is that it removes your layers of self-confidence until you are so co-dependent that you don’t think you can exist without the other person. Often the other person is telling you things like "You'll never find anyone who loves you like I do." I’ve had that said to me in that relationship."

"A few months before leaving for LA, I found myself bored one Saturday morning and decided to download a new app I'd heard about called Hinge. This time, I chose not to be so prescriptive. I made my age range wider and said I was open to dating men with children. I matched with a man whose photos weren't all that great. He described himself as a "Zennist" and had three children — three! — but he was persistent. He started messaging me every single day, which, after a small eternity of emotional f***wittage, seemed to me to be deeply weird. After a fortnight of texting, we agreed to a date. I said I'd only be free for two hours from 5-7pm. I walked into the hotel bar with zero expectation. After all, I was moving to LA. I had a whole new perspective on single life. A distractingly handsome chap sat at a table by the window. It was the first time I had ever met someone on the apps who looked better in real life than in his profile picture. We chatted easily. He asked great questions. By 7pm, I was annoyed with myself that I'd invented a dinner to go to. He kissed me on both cheeks as we said goodbye. We went on more dates. I didn't move to LA. We'll have been together seven years in March. He is now my husband."

"We know who you are: you are a lawyer, not a lance corporal. Stop trying to pretend you know one end of a bazooka from another. By the way, there is no point in wearing camouflage indoors, either. It is there to help make you blend into the grass and bushes, not concrete."

"Matters" her focus turns to time: “not,”"

"A thin trickle of now’s, but a multidimensional world full of luxuriant plasticity."