First impressions

This week we are starting a new competition. Where Final Word gave the coda to well-known books, First Impressions, as the name suggests, will give the opening lines.

The following introduction is from an author whose other work includes a bleak, dystopian novel that was turned into a film by Stanley Kubrick:

"It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

The winner of the final Final Word, who correctly identified Bishop Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge , is Brian Groombridge of the Institute of Education, London.