Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.

Humour, if one looks into it, is principally a matter of retrospect.

It was a morning when all nature shouted Fore! The breeze, as it blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope and cheer, whispering of chip-shots holed and brassies landing...

I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England's most densely populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs. Augustus Fink-Nottle...

Fascination exists only in the imagination of the fascinated.

The voice of a donkey braying in the neighbouring meadow seemed like the mocking laughter of demons.

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.

Sober or blotto, this is your motto: keep muddling through.

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

I think back to those days after the Bastille fell, the Mercure Nationale run from the back of the shop, that little Louise sticking her well-bred nose in the air and flouncing off to bawl out their...

May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into "permanent session" - what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term!

The Robespierre women {as one tended to think of them now} were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then...

But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully - in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.

This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville." Camille cast an eye over his relative's best handwriting....

I do no damage. This is damage, this."He picked up a paper from Camille's desk. "I can't read your writing, but I take it the general tenor is that Brissot should go and hang himself.

Mirabeau: If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all...

Georges told me he would be back, and I have no reason to disbelieve him-but perhaps you'd like to sit down here and write him a letter? Tell him you can't manage the thing without him, which is true....

People said- though this felt like a heresy- that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit- bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.

He looks at Norris, exasperated. He seems to think that with eloquence, with sincerity, with frankness, he can change what is happening. The whole court has seen him slobbering over the queen. How...

A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a...

The rottweiler stood his ground and waited for me to take the next step in the dance of ritualized intimidation. Instead, I leaped at him. Screw ritual. Now was not the time to stand on ceremony.

I can just imagine what the humidity has done to my hair. I'm going to meet your family looking like a poodle with a live wire shoved up its butt. - Paige Winterbourne

I got to eavesdrop at a window. As Clay said, I did have another option. I could wait in the car and let them fill me in later. So, eavesdropping it was.

Got to say, dying would really wreck my best day. Been there, done that, and now that I think about it, Artemis forgot to give me the t-shirt.

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Funny,' Will said, as they picked their way through. 'Things are absolutely awful and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling.

In a nobler age one could have answered such impertinence by jostling his lordship as he stood holding open the door, so that he would have been obliged to demand a meeting. Or did one, even in that...