Quotes from Tim Moore

Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular Centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it's just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges.

I hate plays. I've never seen the point of paying money to watch people shout a lot and pretend to die, and now that I'm the father of three young children I don't have to.

A disproportionate number of retailers, I noted, offered nothing but translucent ochre trinkets: back in the Königsberg centuries, the city made its millions from amber – a substance whose precious allure I have never fully grasped, and which to my mind was very fortunate to have retained its prized aesthetic appeal following the invention of barley sugar. But

His winning opener: 'Hello, English cycleman friend! I have 67 years.

I clanked open a bonnet flap and was met by an almost visible wave of heat. The Model T motor's prodigious talent for thermal radiation would always amaze me. It was as if Henry had made a terrible miscalculation and perfected the external combustion engine.

If you'd tried to explain to me what a butterfly was back in the middle of Finland, I'd have grunted sceptically. Then torn your throat open and supped deep on your warm, life-giving blood.

Life-shortening though it might be, no way in clicking heck was I missing out on the zoomy reward for all my Alp-ascending toil. Going fast downhill is kind of the whole point of cycling; it's what makes it better than walking. Momentum

Italians manifestly enjoy life, but a Frenchman on holiday is Eeyore with cancer.

In Peep Show terms, Berlin is a city of Jeremys marooned in a nation of Marks. My