Quotes from Edmund Crispin

Discretion," said Fen with great complacency, "is my middle name." "I dare say. But very few people use their middle names.

None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.

As the popularity of science-fiction increases, so inevitably does the volume of clownish imprecation against it.

The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....

None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.

Indeed,' he said, tapping his fingers very rapidly on the desk. 'Indeed. I'm very pleased to know you, sir. Do me the honour of sitting down.' Blinking reproachfully at Fen, Cadogan obeyed, though as to what honour he could be doing Mr Rosseter in lowering his behind on to a leather chair he was not entirely clear.

Do not allow yourselves to be cajoled into supposing that political apathy is dangerous. Dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are raised to power, not by apathy, but by mass fanaticism.

None of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates, Fen added dryly, suggest that our judgements are scarcely infallible...And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn't a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.

At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.

The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind.

What are you going to do with your self now?'... 'I? said Fen. 'I shall pursue my orderly and dignified progress towards the grave.

Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who is the Botticelli murderer?' 'I don't know.' 'But you must know by now, my dear fellow,' said the Major plaintively. 'We're practically at the end of the book.' All

There's something romantic about me,' he added reflectively. 'I'm an adventurer manqué: born out of my time.

Intellect stood aside and informed him of this fact.

where there are cottages, there will be tots also, squatting pensively in the dust or moving unsteadily about, absorbed in the tremendous adventure of proceeding unaided from one point to the next.

Om vijf minuten voor twaalf klonk er buiten een luid gebrul, gevolgd door een gerinkel als van oorlogvoerende steelpannetjes.

Brooding over this instance of misplaced fancy, Mr Datchery was conducted into a large and airy study on the right-hand side of the hall, and while Colonel Babington fiddled with a tantalus, sat contemplating the cat Lavender, which had changed its mind and followed them in, and was now distractedly perambulating the furniture.

his reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom.

some twenty boys sat behind wilfully collapsible desks, occupying their brief intermission in various more or less destructive and useless ways.

Simblefield, whose ability to camouflage his ignorance was held in well-justified contempt by the rest of the form

the task of instilling Wordsworthian metaphysics into the barren intellects of the Modern Lower Fifth

To its left stood a transistor radio, which was emitting and indeed had been emitting for some considerable time, a symphonic movement of vaguely romantic cast; from the movement's excessive length, vacuity and derivativeness, Fen judged it to be by Mahler. In

He dredged in a pocket, producing from it a box of non-ethical, and indeed totally inefficacious, tranquillizers, such as could be bought without a prescription across the counter of any chemist's. 'Here, have a Kwye Tewd.' He

Their squalor, being indescribable, will not be described.