"I was not really anything [at university in the late 1930s] but a renegade Catholic liberal humanist with tendencies …"

"Poor as I was [at one stage of university], however, I still insisted on the Friday night booze-up, with Gaunt and Ma…"

"The few Thailand women I met in northern Malaya called the sexual act kedunkading, with a resonant stress on the last…"

"Dylan Thomas was the one big name [in the literary circles Burgess frequented in wartime London], but George Orwell, …"

"The view of Liverpudlians that they are a race apart is well-founded. There is the unanalysable genetic mixture of a …"

"They [Burgess’s students in foreign languages] just could not understand why one word had to be masculine and another…"

"We landed at London docks [finally returning from service with Army education in Gibraltar], and the first thing we s…"

"There was a writer already working on a novel which should present the ultimate austerity, whose properties he took f…"

"In 1943 there had been the Battle of Bamber Bridge, well remembered, though it never got into the official chronicles…"

"Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now."