Opening Sentences

 'Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.'
Some readers might recognise the above as the opening sentence of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (a book I once tried to read, to see what all the fuss was about. I still have no idea, and was so bored I had to give up about a third of the way in.) Anyway, a poll of Amazon readers has identified that sentence as high among the 'most memorable and captivating opening lines from the world of literature'. It finds itself sandwiched in the top five between 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' and 'It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen' (1st and 2nd) and 'All children, except one, grow up' and 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' (4th and 5th). What, no Pride and Prejudice? I suppose Rowling's high placing shows that the reading public (or Amazon's portion of it) has not been put off her works by the ridiculous slurs of her 'woke' antagonists. Which is good. 
   Here is the far from memorable or captivating opening sentence of the book I'm reading at the moment, and if you can identify it you must be very far gone in Kingsley Amis addiction: 
'"Right. On your way, brother. I'm not having you in my house. Go on, hop it."'
These words are spoken by a pub landlord, chucking out a man he suspects, on no particular grounds, of homosexuality. And such things certainly happened. Some time in the mid-Seventies my brother was in a somewhat rough pub in a Buckinghamshire village when two chaps walked in and asked for lager. 'No,' said the guvnor, 'I don't have lager.' 'Why?' they inquired innocently. 'Because I don't serve f*cking p**fs,' he replied. 'On your way.' 
  What is this novel that begins so unpromisingly? It is Difficulties with Girls, a late (1988) effort by Kingsley Amis, one in which his comic genius is only fleetingly discernible. In it, he resurrects Patrick Standish and Jenny Bunn, now Mrs Patrick Standish, from his unsatisfactory early novel, Take a Girl Like You, moves the action on a few years (to 1968), and sees what he can do with them. The answer, sadly, is not very much – and not very much extended over rather too many pages. Once again, as in Take a Girl, he attempts to see things from a female perspective (Jenny's), and once again he fails: Jenny never really comes to life, whereas Patrick, the familiar priapic Amis stand-in, is all too alive. I'm only reading this one because (a) it's one of the few I haven't read, and (b) I spotted it in my favourite charity bookshop, and it offered the prospect of light relief from a rather heavy book I've been reading for review. And it's not all bad: Amis's withering portrayal of publishing and literary types is amusing as ever, if obviously dated, and, even when he's writing a clearly below-par work, his classic, irony-laced style keeps things readable, on a sentence by sentence basis. I read on.