Dorothy L. Sayers — The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

Throw that dreary man Cicero out of the window, and request the divine Virgil (with the utmost love and respect) to take a seat along with his fellow-Augustans and the First Consul, until your pupils are ready to be ushe…

"You shouldn't say thank you for a good review," said Harriet. "That would imply that one had done a favour to the author, whereas one has simply done justice to the book."

I have rather an unwholesome weakness for policemen.

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have b…

Salcombe Hardy groaned: How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.

... protested Mrs. Featherstone, a lady in her thirties, whose violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather t…