"And the people of Narnia will greet us a liberators."

In his best seller, About A Boy, Nick Hornby inadvertently prophesied George W. Bush's policy towards Iraq:

But walking away wasn't Will's style. He always felt something would turn up, even though nothing ever did, or even could, most of the time.

Once, years ago, when he was a kid, he told a schoolfriend (having first ascertained that this friend was not a C.S. Lewis fan) that it was possible to walk through the back of his wardrobe into a different world, and invited him round to explore. He could have canceled, he could have told him anything, but he was not prepared to suffer a moment's mild embarrassment if there was no immediate need to do so, and the two of them scrabbled around among the coat hangers for several minutes until Will mumbled something about the world being closed on Saturday afternoons.

The thing was, he could still remember feeling genuinely hopeful, right up until the last minute: Maybe there will be something there, he had thought, maybe I won't lose face. There wasn't, and he did, loads of it, a whole headful of face, but he hadn't leart a thing from the experience: if anything, it seemed to have left him with the feeling that he was bound to be lucky next time.

When Tony Snow finally informs us that Iraq is "closed on Saturday afternoons," try to look surprised.