A Commonplace Book

Assorted quotes from miscellaneous sources.

The Spectator

In his Notes of 2 March, Charles Moore confesses that he is a sucker for stories in which one can get back to the distant past in very few generations. Recently I came across an interesting specimen. The German author Oskar Maria Graf, who died in 1967, writes in Das Leben meiner Mutter that his grandfather told him that as a small boy, he had heard from his grandfather about how he had carried the statue of Maria from their local Bavarian village church to the Augustinerkirche in Munich in the summer of 1704.

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In 1997, just a couple of days after that death in Paris of Princess Diana at the end of August, I interviewed Luciano Pavarotti at his holiday home overlooking the sea in Pesaro on the Adriatic coast. I also met his horse, Henry, on whom he would take daily rides in the hills during his annual month-long summer break. For the other 11 months of the year, Henry resided at Pavarotti’s lavish equestrian centre near Modena with nothing much to do. But he made up for it all in August when, in the hottest month, he had to carry this colossal burden on daily walks through the Pesaro woods.

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Your reader who wanted advice on what to answer on being asked what he did could have replied as the late Lord Sefton did on being asked the same question. His Lordship replied, ‘What an extraordinary question! It is like asking a Hottentot “Who is your tailor?”’

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Diary Of A Napoleonic Footsoldier (Jakob Walter)

There was always a general need for cooking utensils, and only about one man in a hundred was provided with any. Nearly always I had to eat my horse meat, hempseed, rye, and raw grains uncooked. First of all, one had no fire; secondly, no water, having slowly to melt snow; and, finally, no utensils—usually, however, not any of all these.

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Inside Trader (Trader Faulkner)

At that time Tyrone Guthrie was visiting Australia to advise on the possibility of forming an Australian National Theatre. In Britain, Guthrie had directed all the greats – Olivier, Guinness, Gielgud, and Richardson – in some of the most famous productions of the 1930s and 40s. In Australia, however, he was intensely disliked for having candidly told his hosts, ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, as regards an Australian national theatre, you’re simply not yet ready. So you’d better put that idea down the lavatory and pull the chain.’ This was said at a reception in his honour, after his having seen what Australia had to offer theatrically.

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That was the last I ever saw of him {Trevor Nunn}. I regret still that we never really worked together. I admire his work as a theatre and opera director. He and Peter Hall have followed similar career paths, and when you’re in those powerful positions no consideration can be given to secondary issues like friendship or loyalty.

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Modern Times: A History of the World From the 1920s to the Year 2000 (Paul Johnson)

Yet Japan had some fundamental weaknesses too, reflecting its archaism. Until 1945 it had no system of fixed law. It had maxims, behavioural codes, concepts of justice expressed in ideograms – exactly as in ancient Egypt. But it had no proper penal code; no system of statutory law; no judge-controlled code of common law either.

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The Birth Of The Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (Paul Johnson)

Nor were the horses entirely forgotten. Sir Astley Cooper, then the outstanding London surgeon, attended the sale of the wounded Waterloo horses, considered fit only for the knacker’s yard, bought twelve of the most serious cases, had them taken to his little estate in Hertfordshire, and began the systematic extraction of bullets and grapeshot. He saved the lives of all twelve and let them loose in his park. Then “one morning, to his great delight, he saw the noble animals form in line, charge, and then retreat, and afterwards gallop about, appearing greatly contented with the lot that had befallen them.”

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Louis XVIII himself was a conciliator. He was an absolute stickler for precedent in matters of protocol: Scarcely able to walk, he fell down on parade in 1816 while inspecting troops but angrily rejected the assistance of a young officer and waited, flat on his back, until the “proper person,” the Captain of the Guard, was summoned to help him up.

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The horse trade itself was the most consistently dishonest industry in Britain, as Surtees delighted to remind his readers. Indeed one reason why garages tend to cheat customers today over repairs is that they had their origin in horse mongering, thus preserving an unbroken tradition of fraud.

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The Offshore Islanders (Paul Johnson)

Once in office, he {William the Conquerer} revealed himself as an ardent papalist, fixing his narrow, philosopher’s mind on delicate and abstruse points of principle to the exclusion of every other consideration, including common sense.

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It is always a serious matter when pundits, scholars and academics feel inspired to stray outside their chosen disciplines and lend their authority to vast, portentous and mystic pronouncements about the human race – and still more about any particular race. Oxford dons had hitherto bent their energies to resisting the spread of education, and their influence, though almost wholly bad, had at least been merely negative. Ruskin began a new fashion, and opened the era of the mad professor.

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When Lord Birkenhead was negotiating with both sides of the coal industry in 1921, he remarked that he would have thought the miners’ leaders were the stupidest men in the country, had he not had occasion to meet the owners.

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Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Niall Ferguson)

As Viceroy, Disraeli’s fellow romantic Lord Lytton had been even more extravagant in his hopes of the Indian ‘feudal nobility’, on the principle that ‘the further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting’.

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Civil War: The History of England Volume III (Peter Ackroyd)

Cecil himself declared that he had ‘steered King James’s ship into the right harbour, without cross of wave or tide that could have overturned a cock-boat’. The councillor had entered a secret correspondence with James before Elizabeth’s death; he had urged the Scottish king to nourish ‘a heart of adamant in a world of feathers’.

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On 5 November the old sport of pope-burning returned to the streets, when the effigy of Pope Clement X was set on fire by the London apprentices. A figure of a Frenchman was also used for target practice.

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To Hell with Picasso & Other Essays (Johnson, Paul)

Bertrand Russell was the only philosopher I have come across who always conveyed his meaning clearly and, because he did, you could debate the merits of his conclusions; and they were usually wrong. Even when he said something which was true, brief research into his oeuvre immediately revealed that he had also asserted the opposite, usually a short time before.

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There is no surer formula for a holiday disaster than embarking on a small yacht. It brings instantly to mind Dr Johnson’s condemnation of the sailor’s life: ‘Like being in a prison, with the chance of being drowned too.’

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Canova’s eroticism, then, is to be enjoyed, not just admired, with the help of darkness, candles, shadows and chiaroscuro, and I hope this is borne in mind when our ‘Three Graces’ find a permanent setting. Then the multitude will rediscover him again. It is true that, like most sculptors, he made egregious errors. Asked to sculpt Washington for the state house in Raleigh, North Carolina, he depicted the President delivering his final address to Congress with bare knees and wearing a Roman toga. This, I think, was destroyed in a fire but you can still see, in Naples, Canova’s odd presentation of the ferocious Bourbon, King Ferdinand I, as a transvestite, dolled up like Minerva and on a colossal scale.

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Cezanne is a key figure for those who have turned high art into mere fashion. He was the son of an Aix moneylender and, to his credit, wanted to do something nobler with his life. For half a century he struggled to render nature as he saw it, against all the odds – lack of natural skill, inadequate training in a second-rate art school, an explosive temper which meant he had no friends and so could not learn from other artists, and a compulsive fear of women which prevented him drawing from life. He failed: there was nothing he did which had not been done better by many other painters. But he was nonetheless successfully hyped by the commercial galleries even in his lifetime, and so provided first proof positive that art and skill had parted company.

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The Middle Sea (John Julius Norwich)

A month later there arrived to take up this post the then Governor of Malta, Sir Thomas Maitland. Sir Charles Napier, who served under him, describes him as ‘a rough old despot … insufferably rude and abrupt’, ‘particularly dirty in his person’ and ‘constantly drunk and surrounded by sycophants’. Despite these failings, however, and a Scottish accent that rendered him almost incomprehensible to Corfiots and compatriots alike, ‘King Tom’ was to rule the islands for the next ten years with a firm but surprisingly enlightened hand.

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Who's In, Who's Out: The Journals of Kenneth Rose: Volume One 1944-1979

Lunch Hartley Shawcross at the Savoy. Judicial appointments ... Hartley Shawcross himself still anxious for a City job. At the moment he can save little, partly due to taxation, partly to his own extravagant tastes — yacht, motor cars, etc. Of his big case in Singapore soon, he will make £75 for every £l,000 marked on brief - i.e. several weeks' work for about £250. Cannot refuse briefs - once one does that, practice declines. Hartley Shawcross also tells me of a case before the Lord Chief Justice where he had pleaded that his client had been ruined. 'Ruined?' said Goddard, with a leer at Hartley Shawcross, 'He doesn't seem to have exercised any particular economy in his choice of counsel.'

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Lunch with Alan Barker at the Savoy. He tells me that when Claude Elliott was asked to be a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, he said to the don who invited him that he was not qualified to undertake the necessary duties. The don replied: 'Incompetence rarely knocks in vain in Cambridge.'

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James Pope-Hennessy tells me a story which came to him from the Queen Mother. When the King died in his sleep in 1952, the Queen Mother broke the news to little Prince Charles. She explained that when the valet had taken in the King's tea that morning he had found the King dead. Prince Charles listened gravely to the news, then enquired: 'Who drank the tea?'

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H.R. is apparently a great chum of Lord Reith, whose hobby is collecting special tablets of soap from aeroplanes, hotel rooms, ships, etc. Most odd. On one occasion he had a tablet in a guest room — it had been taken from a ship. The Chairman of the shipping company happened to come & stay with Reith, & occupied this room. He thought that the provision of his own soap was the last word in thoughtful hospitality!

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Also story of Winston and Attlee travelling by train to North during the war. At Carlisle a slightly drunken sailor tried to enter reserved carriage. Detective stopped him, but Winston said: 'Let him sit down, the train is very crowded.' He encouraged the sailor to talk at length about the war. After half an hour Winston disappeared down the corridor. Sailor turned to Attlee, a thought having struck him, and said: 'That's Winston Churchill, isn't it?' 'Yes,' replied Attlee. 'Fancy him talking so friendly like to a couple of twerps like you and me,' said the sailor.

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Denis Greenhill says that nepotism in politics or in the Services or in the Foreign Office is nothing compared with nepotism in certain trade unions, such as printing and the docks. 'Think of the outcry if we chose recruits to the Diplomatic Service on such decidedly family principles.' He adds: 'When I was taken round The Times there were so many people round the first machine we were shown that I thought there had been an accident.'

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{Tom Brimelow} replies that his constant reading of Central Intelligence Reports puts him in mind of one of Melbourne's most memorable remarks: 'What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.'

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A Foreign Office official once sent Alec Douglas-Home a very boring memorandum on some topic such as whaling rights, together with a covering note: 'The Secretary of State may care to read this.' Alec minuted: 'A kindly thought, but an erroneous one.'

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He {Noel Coward} is very sad for the Duchess of Windsor, whom he likes; but he never cared for the Duke {of Windsor}. 'When he was Prince of Wales, I had to play the piano for him for hours on end while he learned the ukulele: it was a rough time. And the next day he would cut me in Asprey's.

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Paul {Johnson} also tells me two stories about Attlee. The first was when Paul was interviewing him about a book which Attlee had just written. At the end of the broadcast, Paul asked Attlee whether he would inscribe the book for him. Attlee took it away into a corner and appeared to write for several minutes on end, which Paul did not dare to open until later. He then saw that the inscription consisted of the single word: 'Attlee'.

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Who Loses, Who Wins: The Journals of Kenneth Rose: Volume Two 1979-2014

Alec Home tells me how Field Marshal Montgomery once much admired a tree at the Hirsel and asked for some cuttings. When next they met, Monty said that they had not taken in his garden. It emerged that he had planted them upside down.

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George {Morpeth} also says that when Dorothy Macmillan, tiring of life with Bob Boothby, returned to Harold Macmillan there was no emotional reconciliation or apology. The doorbell rang, and there she was with her suitcase. She said: 'Are there any letters?'

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Dine at the Beefsteak. John Ure tells me that when he was Ambassador to Cuba Fidel Castro used to send him splendid New Year presents: a net of live lobsters and a suckling pig in a coffin.

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When Elizabeth Home took Mme. Gromyko in tow during a London visit, she asked the Russian if she wanted to go shopping for clothes. Mme. Gromyko replied, 'I am too great. I have no number.'

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I am flabbergasted to receive a handwritten letter from John Butterwick, Chairman of the Old Etonian Association, telling me that I have been elected an honorary member. At first I think it some kind of practical joke, but when I see that there is a second-class stamp on the envelope I realise it is genuine !

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He {Winston Churchill} loved gambling at the tables and lost large sums. Walking away from the Casino in Monte Carlo after losing disastrously, he said to his equally unlucky friend: 'I shall write an article and get it all back. As for you …' The friend waited for Winston to say that he would pay his debts too. But Winston continued: 'As for you, I advise you to do the same.'

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Solly {Zuckerman} has some tapes of long talks with Mountbatten and now has page after page of transcripts. He opened one talk by praising Mountbatten to the skies and rehearsing all his achievements. Mountbatten purred. Solly continued: 'Which makes it all the more remarkable that your contemporaries loathe you.' Poor Mountbatten was very taken aback.

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London Bridge And Its Houses 1209-1761 (Dorian Gerhold)

In 1607 Edmund Nicholson sold his grocery business to Avery Dranfeild and Robert Phipps for £2,700. The money was handed to Thomas Foxhall, John Busbridge and Arthur Lee in trust for Nicholson's daughter Margaret, "being his only child and one whome he alwayes most entirely loved and respected". He had great confidence in his trustees "for theire integrity honest faythfull and upright dealing towards him and the said Margaret". He was also keen that Margaret should not marry young, because she was small and her mother, who had been larger and stronger, had died in childbirth; in particular, he refused to let her marry John Chambers. Nicholson died soon afterwards. The trustees were soon receiving offers of £300 or £400 from gentlemen and others for the hand of a girl with such a fortune. According to the other trustees, Arthur Lee first rejected the suggestion that the three trustees should agree on a husband they all approved of because it was too early, and then agreed to let Chambers marry her when she was only a few days over the age of sixteen. Sadly, she died in childbirth before reaching the age of eighteen.

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The Invention of Nature (Andrea Wulf)

It was during this period that Goethe began to fling both his arms around whenever he went for a walk — provoking alarmed glances from his neighbours. He had discovered, he finally explained to a friend, that this exaggerated swinging of one's arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal — and therefore one of the proofs that animals and humans had a common ancestor. 'That's how I walk more naturally,' he said and couldn't have cared less if Weimar society regarded this rather strange behaviour as unrefined.

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George Scharf's London (Peter Jackson)

Fantoccini was a portable marionette theatre, tall enough to allow the standing puppeteer to manipulate his string- puppets from above in contrast to the Punch & Judy man who worked his glove-puppets from below. According to a Fantoccini man interviewed by Henry Mayhew, it was a Scotsman named Gray who first introduced this kind of show onto the London streets in the 1820s, though it may have been slightly earlier. He was later engaged to perform at Vauxhall Gardens at £10 a week. Mayhew's man was also doing very well thirty years later with crowds following him around 'like flies after honey', taking '18s 6d in half an hour corner-pitching'. He was always accompanied by a man to play the drum and pan pipes, whom he was able to pay 'an average as good as 4s a day'. 'If I'm very lucky, he said, 'I makes it better for him, for a man can't be expected to go and blow his life away into a pandean pipe unless he's well paid for it.'

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Koh-I-Noor (William Dalrymple, Anita Anand)

A little later, the British traveller and spy Alexander Burnes arrived in Lahore and was just as taken with Ranjit Singh as Jacquemont had been; indeed the two quickly became firm friends. ‘Nothing could exceed the affability of the Maharaja,’ Burnes wrote. ‘He kept up an uninterrupted flow of conversation for the hour and a half which the interview lasted.’ Ranjit laid on a round of entertainments for him. Dancing girls performed, deer were hunted, monuments visited and banquets thrown. Burnes even tried some of Ranjit’s home-made hell-brew, a fiery distillation of raw spirit, crushed pearls, musk, opium, gravy and spices, two glasses of which was normally enough to knock out the most hardened British drinker, but which Ranjit recommended to Burnes as a cure for his dysentery.

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The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (Theodore Dalrymple)

As for the exhibits, they were material evidence of the enormous economic strides that Romania had made – precisely the same strides as Albania had made. Displayed in glass cases were telephones, bottles of apple juice, electrocardiographs, cups and saucers, vials of antibiotics, tomato ketchup, radios, plastic cucumbers, chocolate, wheelchairs, indeed a gallimaufry of the products of Romanian industry, which brought to mind the exclamation of an exasperated Soviet author, ‘When will we stop regarding a sausage as an economic achievement and simply as something to eat?’

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Although the book was only 147 pages long, I could not help but recall Lord Macaulay’s review of a two volume biography of Lord Burghley: Compared with the labour of reading these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, the labour of children in the mines, the labour of slaves on the plantation, is but a pleasant recreation.

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On the Shores of the Mediterranean (Eric Newby)

Untameable in the sense that a wild horse can eventually be tamed, even though born in captivity, a camel never deigns to admit that it recognizes its owner even after forty years have passed, although in fact it must be able to do so. Quite often it will develop such a violent, malevolent and totally irrational hatred for him that it can only be assuaged by the owner taking his clothes off and getting a third party to offer them to the camel, which satisfies its feelings by trampling on them and kicking him to death, as it were, in absentia, while the owner remains concealed at such a distance – presumably something over a mile – that the camel cannot smell him. So much for the Arabian camel, or dromedary, which, common sense suggests, should be left to the Beduin to deal with.

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I Never Knew That About London (Christopher Winn)

NATIONAL LIBERAL CLUB. William Gladstone was the first president of the club, whose members must refrain from uttering anti-liberal views. The interior of the club is sumptuous and ornate, particularly the bathrooms, which are so splendid that F.E. Smith, the 1st Earl of Birkenhead, a Conservative, used to make a point of using them, even though he was not a member. When challenged he is reported to have said, ‘Good heavens! I had no idea it was a club as well as a lavatory!’

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The Boundless Sea (David Abulafia)

The scintillating couturier, hairdresser and choir-master Ziryab brought the Persian fashions of the Abbasids all the way to Spain in the eighth century, introducing underarm deodorant, bouffant hairstyles and artichokes to the all-but-barbarian lands close to the dark ocean of the West.

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The Wallem office in Hong Kong closed, and several of its staff were captured by the Japanese. The chief accountant, Kenneth Nelson, was a lucky survivor: he was placed on board a ship carrying more than 1,800 prisoners, but the Japanese had not painted Red Cross markings on the boat, and it was torpedoed by the Allies. Nelson broke out of the sinking ship through the gash left by the torpedo, swimming ashore only to find that he was in Japanese-occupied territory. He was sent back to Hong Kong, escaped from prison there, was shot by a Japanese patrol, but still managed to find his way to his favourite bar, where he ordered his favourite drink with the extra request: ‘Make it a double!’

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Michael Prodger

Édouard Manet found a particularly unusual route into his career. As a young man, his father ignored his wish to become an artist and forced him to join the merchant marine as a first step to becoming a naval officer. On a voyage to Rio de Janeiro , Brazil, the sailors noticed that their cargo of Dutch cheeses had been damaged by seawater. "The rinds had become bleached, and that was a worry" Manet later recalled. "I volunteered to put matters right and, conscientiously, with a shaving brush, I touched up the pale corpses". This bit of sleight of hand, he said, "was my beginning as a painter".

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The Great Crash 1929 (J.K. Galbraith)

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

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Yet to suppose that President Hoover was engaged only in organizing further reassurance is to do him a serious injustice. He was also conducting one of the oldest, most important and, unhappily, one of the least understood — rites in American life. This is the rite of the meeting which is not to do business but to do no business. It is a rite which is still much practiced in our time. It is worth examining for a moment.

Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblies over which they can preside.

Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action. The fact that no business is transacted at a no-business meeting is normally not a serious cause of embarrassment to those attending. Numerous formulas have been devised to prevent discomfort. Thus scholars, who are great devotees of the meeting, rely heavily on the exchange-of-ideas justification. To them the exchange of ideas is an absolute good. Any meeting at which ideas are exchanged is, therefore, useful. This justification is nearly ironclad. It is very hard to have a meeting of which it can be said that no ideas were exchanged.

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Inaugral address at Cambridge 1927 (G. M. Trevelyan)

On the shore where Time casts up its stray wreckage, we gather corks and broken planks, whence much may be argued and more guessed; but what the great ship was that has gone down into the deep, that we shall never see.

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The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England (Ian Mortimer)

In a few cases, the comparison between bishops and earls runs even closer. Some of the men who occupy these episcopal thrones are the sons of noblemen and hanker after a life of action. Bishop Hatfield of Durham is given command of the rearmost division in the march across Normandy during the Crécy campaign (1346). Archbishop Zouche of York similarly demonstrates his valor, jointly leading an English army to victory at the battle of Neville’s Cross (also 1346). Most remarkable of all, in 1383 Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich invades Flanders. He claims to be fighting a “crusade” against the French supporters of Pope Clement but instead he attacks the Flemish supporters of Pope Urban (whom the English also recognize).

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But when memory embraces the night I see those days, long since gone, like the ancient light of extinguished stars travelling still, and shining on.

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Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy (Tim Harford)

Members of the Belville family made a living in London by collecting the time from Greenwich every morning and selling it around the city, for a modest fee. Their clients were mostly tradesfolk in the horology business, for whom aligning their wares with Greenwich was a matter of professional pride.

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London In the Eighteenth Century (Jerry White)

Among many wealthy Londoners vainglorious to the point of absurdity was George Bubb Dodington, originally from Herefordshire, heir to a tremendous fortune from his uncle. Bubb Dodington was a Whig politician and diplomat, studiedly old-fashioned like something from the Restoration: his ‘bulk and corpulency gave full display to a vast expanse and profusion of brocade and embroidery … set off with an enormous tye-periwig and deep laced ruffles’. He made do with a country mansion in Dorset, a villa in Hammersmith and a town house in Pall Mall. His lifestyle in the 1750s was recalled by the playwright Richard Cumberland: he was not to be approached but through a suite of apartments, and rarely seated but under painted ceilings and gilt entablatures. In his villa you were conducted through two rows of antique marble statues ranged in a gallery floored with the rarest marbles, and enriched with columns of granite and lapis lazuli; his saloon was hung with the finest Gobelin tapestry, and he slept in a bed encanopied with peacocks’ feathers in the style of Mrs. Montague. When he passed from Pall-Mall to La Trappe [his villa in Hammersmith, where only men were to be found] it was always in a coach, which I could suspect had been his ambassadorial equipage at Madrid, drawn by six fat unwieldy black horses, short docked and of colossal dignity.

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When a shark nine feet three inches long was caught in the Thames at Poplar in 1787 a silver watch and chain bearing the maker’s name, Henry Watson of Shoreditch, was found in its belly; a man had bought it for his son bound on a voyage to the Cape but the youth had been lost overboard in a squall off Falmouth two years before.

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When Money Dies (Adam Fergusson)

Just before the First World War in 1913, the German mark, the British shilling, the French franc, and the Italian lira were all worth about the same, and four or five of any were worth about a dollar. At the end of 1923, it would have been possible to exchange a shilling, a franc or a lira for up to 1,000,000,000,000 marks, although in practice by then no one was willing to take marks in return for anything. The mark was dead, one million-millionth of its former self. It had taken almost ten years to die.

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More measures were brought in so that the government might be seen publicly to be dealing with profiteering. The Prime Minister of Bavaria even submitted a Bill to the Reichsrat to make gluttony a penal offence. For the purposes of the Bill, a glutton was defined as ‘one who habitually devotes himself to the pleasures of the table to such a degree that he might arouse discontent in view of the distressful condition of the population.’ It was proposed that such a one ‘may be arrested on suspicion, and punished by imprisonment and/or a fine of up to 100,000 marks (about £75) for a first offence’. A second outbreak of gluttony was to entail for the offender penal servitude of up to five years, fines of up to 200,000 marks, and the deprivation of civil rights. Provision was also made for punishing caterers who abetted or connived at the crime, and a special section provided that foreigners, on conviction, would be liable to the extra punishment of expulsion from the Reich.

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Sensation Smith of Drury Lane (Dennis Castle)

The shabby tragedian bowed to a thin-lipped Victorian landlady. Pointing a holed glove at a "Rooms to Let" sign in her porch, he asked: "Have you, madam, special term for actors ?"

"I have," she replied, "it's bastards ! "

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Titanic Lives (Richard Davenport-Hines)

The design, compartmentalization and pricing of British railways were permeated by class demarcations. Class-feeling was innate and inexorable, as an Anglican clergyman demonstrated in 1912 when he protested at the Great Western Railway’s proposal to abolish first-class carriages on short runs: ‘this forcing [of] passengers accustomed to live in sweet and wholesome surroundings to herd with the unwashed and, very often, strongly malodorous things that one meets in a third-class compartment, is nothing less than an outrage’.

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Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollope)

It is sometimes becoming enough for a man to wrap himself in the dignified toga of silence, and proclaim himself indifferent to public attacks; but it is a sort of dignity which it is very difficult to maintain

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A Voyage Around the Queen (Craig Brown)

Another eminent man of letters – sophisticated, posh, loosely republican – accepted an invitation to one of the Queen’s informal lunches with his usual worldly mix of curiosity and condescension. Over the course of his life, he had met Marlene Dietrich, Jackie Kennedy, Dame Rebecca West … why on earth should he feel any different about meeting Her Majesty? But the moment the Queen arrived he turned to jelly. ‘Suddenly I felt physically ill. My legs felt weak, my head swam and my mind went totally blank. “So you’re writing about such-and-such?” said the Queen. I had no idea what I was writing about, or even if I was writing a book at all. All I could think of to say was, “What a pretty brooch you’re wearing, ma’am.” So far as I can recall she was not wearing a brooch at all. Presumably she was used to such imbecility; anyway, she paid no attention to my babbling … I have never felt like that before. I hope that I never do again. I would not have believed that I could have reacted in such a way.’

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The Queen’s natural reticence could often trigger strange reactions. When the playwright Harold Pinter attended lunch at Buckingham Palace with his wife Lady Antonia Fraser, his fellow playwright Václav Havel, the crime writer P. D. James and one or two others, the master of the pause was driven to fill in one of the Queen’s very own pauses with gibberish. ‘Do you know, Ma’am,’ he said, ‘that vegetables were introduced into England very late? Henry VIII never ate a vegetable.’ To which the Queen replied: ‘Oh, yes?’

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Did it ever cross the Queen’s mind that most of her subjects were deranged? In 1956, Lady Annabel Birley and her husband Mark were at a large reception. As they entered, her old friend Patrick Plunkett, the then Deputy Master of the Queen’s Household, grabbed her arm. ‘There you are! Come and meet the Queen!’ Lost for something to say, Lady Annabel thought of dogs. ‘Ma’am, we have a very small dachsund called Noodle who we love and who is very spoilt and sleeps every night in our bed,’ she said. The Queen then turned to her husband Mark who went blank, and repeated, ‘Ma’am, we have a very small dachsund called Noodle who is very spoilt and sleeps every night in our bed …’ The Queen, recalled Lady Annabel, ‘simply nodded and smiled’.

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Dr David Starkey (b. 1945), an expert on the Tudors, was once called ‘the rudest man in Britain’. Perhaps by way of explanation, he said that ‘high malice is almost inherent in the profession of historian’.

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A review of "The Letters of T.S.Eliot Volume 10" in The Spectator (Craig Raine)

In 1944, T.S. Eliot is 56 years old. He seems older: am getting to be a wambling old codger.' He is war-worn: 'I have taken, when in London, to sleeping in my teeth.' As a fire-watcher sharing shifts, his sleep is hampered by understandable pudeur:

'l haven't got enough phlegm to undress completely, and I think it best to sleep in my truss, in case of sudden blasting, which is not vety comfortable'

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These spectacularly unspectacular letters are salvaged by the footnotes. For example, we learn that Michael Burn was bisexual, slept with Guy Burgess, met Hitler at a Nuremberg rally, was briefly persuaded of 'the values ofNational Socialism' but later

became a communist after witnessing poverty in the Barnsley coalfields. He joined the commandos and was wounded and captured during the raid on St Nazaire in 1942. He was awarded the MC and sent to Colditz. There, he was the recipient of an aid package from a Dutch one-time lover, Ella van Heemstra. On his release from Colditz, he sent her food and cigarettes. She sold the cigarettes to buy penicillin to save the life of her 'ill and undernourished daughter — the future actress Audrey Hepburn'.

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The Diet of the Diseased (James Hart, 1633)

As concerning Mushroms, or Toad-stooles, as they are commonly called, although properly they be no roots, yet are they commonly ranked among them. It is a food (if so it deserveth to be called) in small request here amongst us: howbeit in France, Italy, and adjacent countries, it is in no small esteeme: and therefore I shall neede to say lesse concerning this subject. I advise therefore all our Centrie, who travell into those forraigne countries, if they be wise, altogether to absteine from such excrements of the earth; some of them (yea, the greater part) being venomous, as I could by true histories make appear: all of them being of an evill qualitie, and breeding no good nourishment at all.

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