From the ground, Colombo’s port does not look like much.[…] But viewed from high up in one of the growing number of skyscrapers in Sri Lanka’s capital, it is clear that something extraordinary is happening: China is creating a shipping hub just 200 miles from India’s southern tip.

He couldn't carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, but he keeps time like a damn machine.

In vases of coloured glass, expensive cut flowers were silently screaming as they smellily expired.

His point of view is the exceedingly advantageous one obtained by an American birth, a French education and a long continued residence in England, and his manner may be described as that of a light fencer whose deftness and despatch are in graceful contrast to the exertions of the unwieldy broadswordsmen of literature.