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" You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety. "

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" Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws. "

Craig Brown

You

Beautiful

Faith

" Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued. "

" How I hate the Beautiful Game! I hate its cry-baby players and its gruff, joyless managers, its blokish supporters and its sinister owners, its whistle-peeping referees and its chippy little linesmen, its excitable commentators and - perhaps most of all - its unpluggable 'analysts.' "

" The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible. "

" One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun. "

" It is only if you happen to be a newscaster that the tongue-twister spells peril. "

" Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite. "

" Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one. "

" It strikes me that golf's great virtue is that it gets you out of the house, away from everyday bothers, away from the endless round of looking for this, that and the other. "

" By and large, the artistic establishment disapproved of Margaret Thatcher. "

" Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then. "

Craig Brown

Comedy

Time

" Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how. "

" When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks. "

" Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it. "

" Just as there is something about an empty skip that makes you want to fill it, so there is something about a full skip that makes you want to empty it. "

" Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth. "

" The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival. "

" When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read. "

" Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift. "

" The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common. "

" Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor. "

" There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing. "

" Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish. "

" I have twice met Jeffrey Archer, and on both occasions was struck by the firmness of his handshake - and the way he looked me straight in the eye, too. "

" What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now. "

" Like many men, I am highly skilled in the art of losing things but prefer to outsource the recovery process. "

Craig Brown

Losing

Process

" It is hard being a football loather, a football unfan. I sometimes feel as lonely as the sole survivor in the last reel of a Zombie film, as, one by one, old friends reveal themselves, with their glassy stares and outstretched arms, to have succumbed to the lure. "

" The first sign builders are on their way is when - hey, presto! - a skip appears outside your house. "

" Alan Whicker may be the last Briton to have worn a silver-buttoned blazer with complete confidence. "

" As a rough rule of thumb, I would say the smaller the pond, the more belligerent the fish. "