Opening Lines

No contest.

1. He was a skinny kid, just twenty-six when it started, with a face set off by a large nose that gave him the look of a hawk.

2. Across the road was Hampstead Heath.

3. He was being carried along, like a cork on the tide.

4. I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

5. I was ordered to Canada; that pie-dish of privilege and broken promises: to Toronto.

6. I went to key West in Florida this year to enter the annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest.

7. As the vibrations died down in the laboratory the big man rose from the glass chair and viewed the complicated apparatus on the table.

8. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.

9. One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.

10. I'd finished my pie and was having a second cup of coffee when I saw him.