'By now, my brain felt as if it was roughly pinioned in a vice while being steadily pounded with a small wooden hammer. Over the next four hours, it got worse.’

'Perhaps it helped that I wrote my own police report – stamped without being read – and in Spanish so deliberately bad that it wouldn’t make sense to anyone in England.'

'Learning in a swimming pool with this wealth of underwater richness would be like hiring Pavarotti to play the spoons.'