Undoubtedly an odd quotation; it comes from line 60:8 of the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament, which reads in full Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe: Philistia, triumph thou because of me. The context is that people would often use washpots to clean their feet of sand after roaming the desert, and Moab, a kingdom of Jordan which was often warring against the Israelites, needed to be overcome. The Israelites therefore likened these containers to the kingdom. Fry chose this as the title for his 1997 autobiography as he considered the book to be 'scrubbing at the grime of years'.