You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness.

Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift.

It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.

Howard Jacobson Quotes