Wonderful Britain

They say that the first line of a book is always the most difficult to write.
Have you got any memorable first lines from your favourite British book to share?

"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that".

A Christmas Carol - By Charles Dickins

"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.


Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh