“That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.”

“Back in the day, when I started, you were still allowed to make mistakes. You got to make your mistakes in public, in a way. I think the world was a more forgiving place when I started my career, in the sense that we got time and space to develop as a writer.”

“Time for the likeliest story since Mary told Joseph it was God’s.”

“Everybody seemed to like Skype except him, Tony thought, closing his office door then settling in front of his screen. His dislike was both personal and professional. Everybody looked weird on Skype. Everyone, frankly, looked like a potential patient. There was something very unsettling about that fish-eyed stare. Even people he liked looked deranged. From a professional perspective, the trouble was you could never see enough of the person you were in conversation with to gauge their body language. They might be giving off all sort of signals you’d be aware of in what his boss had taken to calling “F2F encounters,” but the Skype interface could hide a multitude of clues.”

“As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of life: I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy parker.”

“A society gets the criminals it deserves.”

“That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.”