To be fair, Joseph isn't stupid; he's barmy.

The Government seems to be in mess. The country is full of intelligent Jews. Why, therefore, must Mrs Thatcher employ three really stupid ones in Lawson, Britton and Joseph? To be fair,  Joseph isn't stupid; he's barmy.

[15th January 1986]

R. Mortimer & C. Mortimer, Dear Lupin: letters to a wayward son (2012), 167

Constantinople is the great capital, the city, the attraction and the hope of all the Hellenes

In 1844, the Prime Minister Collettis in a speech to the constituent assembly revealed the place of Constantinople in Greek hearts and minds: 'There are two great centres of Hellenism, Athens and Constantinople. Athens is only the capital of the kingdom; Constantinople is the great capital, the city, the attraction and the hope of all the Hellenes.' Pictures of the Oecuminical Patriarch hung on   Greek walls beside the king and Queen of the Hellenes - and Aya Sofya, without minarets.


P. Mansel, Constantinople: city of the world's desire (1995), 280

Europeans who regarded a country as a career rather than a cause

Like the Mavrocordato, the Testa refused to be imprisoned in one nationality. They were an extreme example of a once common phenomenon: Europeans who regarded a country as a career rather than a cause. Hereditary diplomats, they worked in Constantinople  because it was a centre of diplomacy as, in the eighteenth century, foreigners worked in Paris because it was a centre of fashion (intellectual, artistic and vestimentary). The Testa's primary loyalties were to the city [Constantinople], the Catholic religion, and whichever power they were serving at the time.

P. Mansel, Constantinople: city of the world's desire (1995), 211

The insane Socrates of the National Assembly

The sweeping away of the existing order had left people biddable and lacking in direction, he said, and easy prey for imposters posing as idealists. Young people in particular had been deeply corrupted by revolutionary ideas. They had fallen under the malign influence of Rousseau, 'the insane Socrates of the National Assembly', a philosopher whose person and thought were dedicated to an 'ethics of vanity', which exalted the self and ignored values of honour, duty, humility and personal virtue

J. Norman, Edmund Burke (2013), 145

England was the country that God had got to first, properly

Poor, poor Treece, thought Emma; for she loved to sympathise, Poor man, he has tried to show us all that foreigners aren't funny; but they are. After all, there was one thing that every Englishman knew from his very soul, and that was that, for all experiences and all manners, in England lay the norm; England was the country that God had got to first, properly, and here life was taken to the point of purity, to the Platonic source, so that all ways elsewhere were underdeveloped, or impure, or overripe. Everyone in England knew this, and an occasion like the present one was not likely to prove that things had altered.

M. Bradbury, Eating people is wrong (1959), 43