Zitat des Tages von Craig Brown:
What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now.
More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.
The news is increasingly full of mismatched people saying daft things to one another.
All the wealthiest people in the U.S. seem compelled to brag about how humble they are.
By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher.
It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril.
Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it.
Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.
The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.
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.
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.
Some people see life as a game of chess, while others prefer to see it as a game of cricket; but the longer I live, the more I think of it as a game of Consequences.
There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.
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.
Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence.
My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.
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.
One of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions.
When cars honk and hoot and drunks squeeze out of car windows and scream, you can be sure that football is in the air.
In real life, nothing would be more tedious than trailing around after two strangers as they went house-hunting in Hertfordshire. But for some reason, television is more compelling than real life.
Children are perfectly happy to sit next to spiders; it is only grown-ups who are frightened away.
More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.'
I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too.
When I was a boy, I used to stay with a school friend in Bexhill, in Sussex, which was then well-known for being the town with more oldies than any other. Aged ten, I felt slightly embarrassed by this, though I'm not sure why.
One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.
My life is a monument to procrastination, to the art of putting things off until later, or much later, or possibly never.
Men know something that women don't know. Never ask directions of a stranger.
Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.
It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other.
