It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me. - V. S. Pritchett

In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young.

Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.

Yes, well I had all my serious illnesses in late middle age. And now I'm just stuck, I'm afraid.