Mark Forsyth

‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’

Ideally, I’d like to arrest her and take her mugshot, but I’m not sure it’s possible. At least then, when that curious alien asked me what drunkenness was, I would have something to show.

‘If you indulge their love of drinking by supplying them with as much as they desire, they will be overcome by their own vices as easily as by the arms of an enemy.’

Not even the Westerners drink alcohol like we do. They pour a neat glass of wine and sip it. We here put a four-litre barrel of vodka on the floor and drink it until we go blind. We don’t even know how to drink alcohol or anything. What a bunch we are! We’re all the masters of excess and wastage.

A new drug is a dangerous thing, not because the drug is dangerous in and of itself, but because the culture has not yet laid down rules on how to consume it.

He knew that the jury would have to be composed of soldiers and free settlers, all of whom he had in his pocket, and all of whom had already taken a dislike to Bligh.

Macquarie’s genius consisted in realizing that everybody was a crook, accepting it, celebrating it and then outcrooking them all.

There’s also the theory that 1914–17 are the only three years in Russian history when the population has been sober enough to notice exactly what their government were doing to them.

The final bizarre consequence of Prohibition was that the British sewed up the business of transatlantic passenger voyages, because their ships sold booze.

Any society is an edifice of rules, and no matter how good those rules are, how reasonable, how just, how sensibly worked out for our own safety and welfare, we must occasionally escape them. Humankind has a compulsion to create rules and then to break them. This makes humankind a trifle silly, but also a trifle glorious.