He was inspired to do so by having picked up G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill in a second-hand bookshop and read its first words: 'The human race, to which so many of my readers belong…' He said that the rest of the novel did not live up to this glorious opening, but it would have been impossible for any extended piece of writing to do so.

It is not only the writers of novels who strive to arrest the reader's attention by a first phrase or sentence: writers of non-fiction do so also. They want to establish either the importance or the fascination of their subject. A splendid example of this is T. D. Kendrick's book on the Lisbon Earthquake, written in 1955 on the bicentenary of the disaster. The book begins:

In October 1777 John Wesley said in a letter to his friend Christopher Hopper, 'there is no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake.'