Any mug could see we were not discussing bicycles. ‘You're going to double-dink me,’ she said. […] ‘Put me in my ball gown on your bar.’ ‘I'll double-dink you,’ I said. ‘It'd be a pleasure.’

But literary escorts are not simply chauffeuses; they are coaches, reconnaissance experts, debriefers, psychologists, comrades in arms.

Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

Zing! The joke had rebounded back on the one who started it. Ouch! Mama Jane winced ruefully. We all dissolved in laughter at the good-natured repartee.