It is rarely, too, that one will be able to demonstrate readily upon a patient all that he can observe in his own person; for the patient has not the same practice of the auto-laryngoscopist, nor the same interest in it; while, in addition, his organs are seldom in a state of complete normalism, or he would have no occasion to consult the practitioner.

In the early days the reviewers compared him to the late Douglas Adams, but then Terry went on to write books as enthusiastically as Douglas avoided writing them, and now, if there is any comparison to be made of anything from the formal rules of a Pratchett novel to the sheer prolific fecundity of the man, it might be to P. G. Wodehouse.

Of the known styles that signal boxes referred to, neo-Gothic was a favourite - especially in the points of locking room windows, and particularly on the Great Northern Railway.

the law of reciprocity which informs like a gravitational force the seemingly aberratic motions of his bizarre, fictive universe