The controls fell easily to hand, and from there onto the floor. - Clive James

When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously rococo English in Australia today, but nobody will be able to inherit it. To know him would not be enough. You would have to know what he knows.

One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.

Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.