I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form….

One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand..

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend..

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel..

If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide..

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, del….

I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh..

Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!.

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in whi….

Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat..

I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instan….

My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker bas….

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. N….

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago bec….

Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, o….

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible ….

Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never ….

I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and….

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspir….

I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my….

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early ….