Which is more important to you, your family or Torres?

Despite the almost absurd paternalism, there is a familiarity about the relationship between Sr Torres and his staff which partly validates his claim that the staff are treated like family. ‘If one of them is ill, I pay for him to go to the best doctors in Barcelona,’ St Torres told me. I heard other stories: ‘I do not like that red jersey,’ one employee was told, ‘it is a foolish colour for a man your age.’ It may have been pure coincidence that the autonomous election campaign had just begun, with the Socialists threatening to win the local seat. Another employee was given a gruelling schedule of overseas visits, which mean he would be away for Christmas. ‘My wife is expecting our first baby at that time,’ he complained. He received the following poser in response: ‘Sr X, which is more important to you, your family or Torres?’

H. Eyres, Wine dynasties of Europe (1990), 166

We don't just have one, we have many hells!

"I didn't think there was a hell in Buddhism," I said.
"Oh yes," Jinpa said, with a tut. "We don't just have one, we have many hells! We have one where it's hot, one where it's cold, eighteen different hells in all. Everyone is terrified of ending up there."
"I seem to remember reading that, according to the Buddha, hell is more like a state of mind," I said.
"Do you mean to say there really isn't a hell?" Jinpa looked at me, thunderstruck. "Then what is the point of walking all the way around Mount Kailash?"

E. Fatland, High (2020), 503

While it is constantly said that the world is getting smaller and there are fewer and fewer boundaries, never before have borders been more rigid than they are now

The days when caravans could freely cross mountain passes and national borders are long gone. While it is constantly said that the world is getting smaller and there are fewer and fewer boundaries, never before have borders been more rigid than they are now. There can be no doubt that the map takes precedence over the terrain: the abstract red lines of the map are fiercely guarded on the ground by cameras, motion sensors, armed guards, and often also by physical barriers such as barbed wire, fences and walls.

E. Fatland, High (2020), 65

Like farming land, some patches of retail were just barren, would yield no crop

Like farming land, some patches of retail were just barren, would yield no crop. Other patches, perhaps very close, were fertile ground. Nobody could tell you why definitely. If you had selling in your blood, from generations, you could tell whether a site for a shop would work or not, as a farmer could tell good land from barren by picking up a fistful and sniffing it. It might be just the way that sun hit the front of your shop in the morning. It might be on the road that people naturally walked down to to get to the tube station, and preferably on the other side of the road to their path, so they would  get a good look at your shop rather than walking straight past it, head down.

P. Hensher, The Emperor Waltz  (2014), 147

I came to feel that a man who had never ... tried to reach a compromise and never had to make a ruthless decision, could not have much knowledge of the day to day problems of politics

At the time I knew nothing about politics and scarcely listened. Later on, when I had spent some time on the perimeter of public life, I came to feel that a man who had never sat on a committee, never bargained with an opponent, never tried to reach a compromise and never had to make a ruthless decision, could not have much knowledge of the day to day problems of politics; and many of his [Berenson's] judgements on English politics were grotesquely wrong.

K. Clark, Another part of the wood (1974), 153

You must be ... the other Sir Kenneth Clark is a fearful shit; everybody says so

I found myself among a group of members none of whom I remembered having seen, who naturally did not address a word to me. After about ten minutes a man who looked like a Naval Officer, wearing a claret-coloured bow-tie, advanced towards me and said "You're Sire Kenneth Clark." I agreed. "The Bart, of course", he said. "No," I said "I am not a baronet." "But you must be," he said, "the other Sir Kenneth Clark is a fearful shit; everybody says so." "Well, I'm afraid I'm the only one"; and as he left me I wondered if he had meant to insult me or was simply misinformed.

 K. Clark, Another part of the wood (1974), 13

Many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler

I was born on July 13th, 1903, at 32 Gosvenor Square, a space now occupied by the American Embassy. My parents belonged to a section of society known as 'the idle rich', and although in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler. They took no part in public affairs, do not read the newspapers, and where almost entirely without the old upper-class feeling of responsibility for their tenants.

K. Clark, Another part of the wood (1974), 1

Wrote frequent letters to the Spectator which were never printed

Otherwise Helen ate a good deal, continued to work on her melodramatic novel and, like most members of the bookish upper classes, wrote frequent letters to the Spectator which were never printed. She had more luck with The Times. Something should be done, she insisted, about the decline of the stately homes of England

P. French, Younghusband (1992), 316

To describe Yak-rustling as ‘an overt act of hostility’ by a foreign power is plainly absurd

The fact that the Viceroy of India was sending telegrams about the fate of frontier livestock to the Secretary of State (and hence the Cabinet) shows the flimsiness of the justifications he was putting forward for invading Tibet. To describe Yak-rustling as ‘an overt act of hostility’ by a foreign power is plainly absurd. It shows the way Curzon was willing to use almost any excuse to obtain sanction for a further advance into Tibet, so certain was he that the Russian bear needed to be checked.

P. French, Younghusband (1992), 193

Just shake them up and tell them for God’s sake remember they are Englishmen

The world of officialdom sent him a memorandum in February outlining a proposal to withdraw representation from Chitral altogether. ‘One feels inclined to go up to these people who invent such timid counsels,’ he spluttered to Nellie, ‘and just shake them up and tell them for God’s sake remember they are Englishmen.’

P. French, Younghusband (1992), 107

One man was defined not by his rank or his manner of death, but simply with the bald words: ‘A Wykehamist’

[in Dharamsala] Streams of sunlight shot through the stained glass windows behind him, and ton to the stone tablets which remembered earlier members of the congregation; soldiers, traders and tea planters, dead from dysentery or fever . A lieutenant has been ‘mauled by a bear’. While a captain had died with his ‘faithful servant’ by his side. One man was defined not by his rank or his manner of death, but simply with the bald words: ‘A Wykehamist’

P. French, Younghusband (1992), 21

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalised, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power to deal with complicated phenomena is extraordinary.

Francis Galton, cited in J. Vincent, Beyond measure (2022), 253

Measurement, like speech and play, is the cornerstone of cognition

Measurement, like speech and play, is the cornerstone of cognition. It encourages us to pay attention to the boundaries of the world, to notice where the line ends up and the scales tip. It requires that we compare one portion of reality to another and describe the differences, creating a scaffolding of knowledge. … If we could not measure, then we could not observe the world around us; could not experiment and learn. Measurement allows us to record the past and by doing so uncover patterns that help predict the future

J. Vincent, Beyond measure (2022), 1

Quickly my literal faith in God unraveled. My faith in the Church as a community, however, continued

Quickly my literal faith in God unraveled. My faith in the Church as a community, however, continued. People from my grandparents' church helped us through the difficult time: they visited our house frequently to make sure we had enough food while my depressed mother spent most of her days in bed. Once she was back on her feet and began to work double shifts to support us, they often invited me to their homes for dinner, so that I wouldn't be alone for too long with sad thoughts in my head.

...

I wondered if marriage to ordinary people was what religion was like to me after my father's departure: a companionship they abided by, out of habit and loyalty, which, even after the absolute faith and passion had long gone, would continue to offer support and consolation. A constant that was satisfactory, if not thrilling. Not a bad thing at all to live by, I used to think.

M. Lee, 8 lives of a century-old trickster (2023), 162-3

He had the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between two women

Mt Pett, meanwhile, had been trailing in the rear with a hunted expression on his face. He had the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between two women, and only a wet cat in a strange back yard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect. A millionaire several times over, Mr Pett would have cheerfully given much of his wealth to have been elsewhere at that moment.

P.G Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1918), 57 

Women say this sort of thing carelessly, with no wish to wound; but that makes it none the less hard to bear

'Oh, I am glad you have begun to take an interest in cricket. It is simply a social necessity in England. Why you ever made such a fuss about taking it up I can't think. You used to be so fond of watching baseball, and cricket is just the same thing.'

A close observer would have marked a deepening of the look of pain on Mr Crocker's face. Women say this sort of thing carelessly, with no wish to wound; but that makes it none the less hard to bear. 

P.G Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1918), 39-40

True to the most basic of German instincts ... I was drawn to Italy

True to the most basic of German instincts and thus following in the footsteps of the Teutons, Hohenstaufen emperors, and Deutschromer art worshippers, I was drawn to Italy, my ultimate destination being Palermo, where I had felt so at home in my childhood dreams as a squire or falconer for Frederick II and a member of Konradin's retinue when the Staufers went under.

G. Grass, Peeling the onion (2006), tr. M.H. Heim (2007), 314

Ulrich von Hutten was my idol, the Pope and his clerics my enemies

I tried to work up the requisite hatred for the reputed blue-bloods, but in fact I was torn. From the period of my mental excursions into the dark corners - and enlightened ones - of German history I had retained my admiration for the Hohenstaufen line of Emperors; I would have been only too happy to serve as a squire to Frederick II in thirteenth-century Palermo. And when it came to the Peasant Wars  a few centuries later, I was not only a fan of Thomas Muntzer's, I also sided with the upper-class ringleaders of the insurrection, men with noble names like Franz von Sickingen, Georg von Frundsberg, and Gorz von Berlichingen. Ulrich von Hutten was my idol, the Pope and his clerics my enemies. 

G. Grass, Peeling the onion (2006), tr. M.H. Heim (2007), 90-91

He ran his business like it was a plot

He ran his business like it was a plot, people used to say. Khalifa thought of him as the pirate, nothing was too small for him: smuggling, moneylending , hoarding whatever was scarce as well as the usual stuff, importing this and that.

A. Gurneh, Afterlives (2020), 9

The Venetians used to say that whenever the Golden Horses were moved, an empire fell

There they are now, out of the sun at last. Through the door of their last resting-place you may see their forms, proud as ever, silhouetted against the half-light from the windows. Their hoofs are raised, as always, in a noble gesture of greeting, companionship or compassion. Their heads are turned still, fraternally towards each other. But the life has gone out of them at last, as the power and purpose have left Venice. The Venetians used to say that whenever the Golden Horses were moved, an empire fell – the Byzantine Empire in 1204, the Venetian Empire in 1797, the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, the Kaiser’s Empire in 1918,Hitler’s Empire in 1945. This their last move, though, is no more than an obituary gesture, a long farewell, a recognition that the glory of Venice has gone, and only the forms remain.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 187

Their chief achievement was to leave them, as they found them, unmistakably Greek

The Venetians left the Ionians peacefully if in obloquy, pushed out by Napoleon, and their place was presently taken by the British, whose manners were not dissimilar and whose intentions towards the islands were much the same. When, in their turn, the British voluntarily left in 1864, the islands became the most cultivated and progressive parts of the new Greece, and for this the Venetians could properly claim credit. They had ruled the Ionians for four centuries, and their chief achievement was to leave them, as they found them, unmistakably Greek.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 152

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima

Certainly the arrogance of the Venetians has never been forgotten by the Greeks – who, established here in Homeric times long before Venice existed, have out-stayed all successive rulers to remain as Greek as ever. Until the land reforms in Greece after World War II the Catholic descendants of the Venetians, with their Latinized local associates, remained overwhelmingly the landlords of Naxos. Embittered locals used to say that the war had not been won at all until the Catholics of the Kastro had been dispossessed. Seven and a half centuries after the arrival of Sanudo and his young men, the lifestyles of the island remained recognizably those of conquerors and conquered: even in the 1950s, there used to be at least one family of the Kastro which, loading its necessary comforts upon strings of mules, set out each spring beneath parasols, attended by servants and household pets, seigneurially through the dusty suburbs for the annual migration to its summer estates in the interior of the island, held by right of conquest since the beaching of Marco’s galleys.

A tumultuous line of princelings governed the Venetian Aegean under the watchful, often baffled and sometimes infuriated eye of the Serenissima. The chronicles of the Archipelago are confused and very bloody, and the only constant thread linking the feuds and the dynasties is the shadowy presence of Venice in the background, the knowledge of her war-galleys over the horizon and the stern if not invariably effective supervision of Doge and Grand Council far away.


J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 49

For old he was, but rascally

For old he was, but rascally. Enrico Dandolo’s part in the Fourth Crusade has been debated ever since, but we may assume that, however moved his people were by the cause, he himself did nothing out of pure religious impulse. It is very unlikely that he ever intended to lead his ships to an assault on Egypt, as the Crusaders thought. Venetian trade with Egypt was extremely valuable to Venice, and some scholars suggest indeed that Dandolo told the Sultan of Egypt all about the Crusaders’ plans.

The chances are that even as that great white hat was placed upon his head, Dandolo was planning to lead the Crusade to a very different destination: not an Islamic objective at all, but the greatest city of Christendom itself, Constantinople. The time had come to humble the arrogant emperors, and ensure once and for all Venetian commercial primacy in the east.

J. Morris, The Venetian Empire (1980), 21

Ten tons of animal bones. 99.9 per cent of which were equine

Certainly by the fourth millenium BCE: remains found in a northern Kazakh burial site from that period contained ten tons of animal bones. 99.9 per cent of which were equine. Many of the jaws and teeth show the sort of wear you would see on a horse fitted with a bit, which suggests that steppe people were riding horses about 5,000 years ago at a time when the first pharoah was unifying the upper and lower lands of Egypt, when Gilgamesh built the incomparable walls of Uruk, Aborigines were engraving rocks around what is now Sydney, settlements began to appear in Central America and the Cycladic civilisation emerged in Greece.  

A. Sattin, Nomads (2022), 48-9

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers. The first to stop hunting and gathering did so no more than 12,000 years ago, which is but a dot on the human timeline. This was when food was abundant and there were few of us to eat it. The Bible's Old Testament and the Quran's Sura 2, al-Baqarah, the Cow, present this as time spent in a garden, a time of great happiness and perfect innocent in the Garden of Eden.

There are many translations of the word Eden, but all of them point in the same direction, from the Sumerian edin, meaning a plain or steppe, to the Aramaic word for well-watered and the Hebrew for pleasure.

A. Sattin, Nomads (2022), 15

The youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century

The index, after all, did not arrive alone, but is rather the youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century. And all have one thing in common: they are all designed to streamline the reading process, to bring a new efficiency to the way we use books.

D. Duncan, Index, a history of the (2021), 56

Had her loyalty rested on no securer foundation than diffidence - on sheer, silly incompetence?

For a moment Meg was shocked. Isabel had, indeed, played the part of a loyal wife in all this; but had her loyalty rested on no securer foundation than diffidence - on sheer, silly incompetence?

But it was wrong to be shocked. Who has ever been able to analyse the motives, good and bad, heroic and ludicrous, which add up to such qualities as loyalty and courage? Isn't it enough that they do add up?

C. Fremlin, Uncle Paul (1959), 211

He had created a world that was complete, self-sufficient and almost faultless

The man and his work were one. Evelyn Waugh later described Wodehouse’s work as timeless, but it is also immutable. The comparative lack of development in his writing is one of its unique features: no other twentieth-century English writer of consequence evolved in his mature work as little as Wodehouse. He had created a world that was complete, self-sufficient and almost faultless.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 371

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him. In addition to his upbringing, there was his temperamental preference for finding the easiest way out of a tricky situation – and his obsessive commitment to his writing. It is these two factors that colour his actions with the taint of irresponsibility. Combined with his failure to understand the nature of Nazism, they proved fatal to his reputation.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 305

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots

Wodehouse was not alone in flirting with the studios. The talkies had triggered a new gold rush, anticipated by Herman Mankiewicz when in 1925, after a visit to the West Coast, he had cabled his friend Ben Hecht, saying: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’ Post-war Hollywood was challenging New York, where the first big studios had been based. The movie-makers’ desperate need for Broadway talent, people who could supply dialogue and scenarios, inspired a westward stampede of playwrights and short story writers. The exodus from the East was, Wodehouse wrote later, ‘like one of those great race movements of the middle ages’.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 184

Change in to white flannels, play from midday to sundown, breaking only for a cold lunch and a pint or two in the pavilion

Every summer weekend during this opulent decade, young men from the City, or the Imperial Civil Service, or the newspaper and magazine world of Fleet Street and the Strand, would take the train to some nearby provincial town, Tunbridge Wells perhaps, or Stevenage. There, they would throw their heavy cricket bags onto the horse-drawn carriage awaiting them at the station, then rattle through leafy summer lanes to the ground, change in to white flannels, play from midday to sundown, breaking only for a cold lunch and a pint or two in the pavilion, before returning to the City in the fading light of summer.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 77

The old postcards to not detect Maurilia as it was but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards to not detect Maurilia as it was but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

I. Calvino, Invisible cities (1972), tr. W. Weaver (1974),  27 

Fifty-six units a week as the safe upper limit for male alcohol consumption

Back in 1982 both the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Medical Journal’s ABC of alcohol were giving fifty-six units a week as the safe upper limit for male alcohol consumption. Yet, five years later, this limit was reduced to twenty-one units a week, without any reasons for the change being given and without there being any substantive new research to back it up.

A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1995), 321

His Majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors and his officers

It is disgusting to notice the increase in coffee used by my subjects and the amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. Everybody is using coffee. His Majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors and his officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended on to endure hardship or beat his enemies in the case of the occurrence of another war.

Frederick the Great of Prussia, 1777. Quoted in A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1995), 212-3

Britain ... accounted for over 90 per cent of all the sherry that was produced

By the middle of the nineteenth century, sherry was so popular in Britain that it accounted for over 90 per cent of all the sherry that was produced and for 43 per cent of the nations’ total wine imports. The enormous consumption of sherry Is to be explained by the fact that it was not drunk as an aperitif as it is today but was consumed throughout the meal.

A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1995), 84-5

Heavy drinking has always been part of the British character

Heavy drinking has always been part of the British character – and one that has differentiated the inhabitants of these islands from their neighbours on the Continent of Europe. The eighth century missionary and reformer Saint Boniface had been born in Devon but spent most of his life working on the Continent. In his old age he wrote to the Cuthbert, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he referred to a report that ‘In your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent. This is an evil peculiar to pagans and our race. Neither the Franks not the Gauls nor the Lombards nor the Romans nor the Greeks commit it.’

A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1995), 25

I got the impression that it was going to keep going without even getting going

About ten years ago (actually, on checking the dates, it turns out to have been fourteen) I abandoned A Dance to the Music of Time after volume 5: Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. No one could say that, after twelve hundred pages, I hadn't given Powell a chance, though that's effectively what my father-in-law did say. It really gets going in volume 6, he claimed, though I suspect that had I announced my retirement after The Kindly Ones (volume 6), he'd have pointed ahead to volume 7, The Valley of Bones. I got the impression that it was going to keep going without even getting going. Neither witty nor entertaining, except in that passing-the-time sort of way that is almost synonymous with wasting time, it seemed entirely devoid of merit.

G. Dyer, The last days of Roger Federer (2022), 74

I have a strong suspicion that Russia does not really know what she is up to in Chinese Central Asia

It is natural in human beings to fear the unknown and, fearing it, to overestimate its power, as well as its will, to harm. Anyone who works behind the scenes is de facto assumed to be working, with abnormal efficiency, on some deep laid plan. This may be so with Russia; but in the Soviet Union plans, however deep-laid, have to a tendency to produce results surprising to all concerned, and a policy directed by highly centralized, half trained bureaucracy and developing in the territory of a foreign Power may be less darkly potent than its cloak of secrecy suggests. I have a strong suspicion that Russia does not really know what she is up to in Chinese Central Asia, and that her activities there are guided, to an even greater extent that Japan's activities in North China and Mongolia, by opportunism  

P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 263

All serious subjects, and particularly anything to do with myself, seem to me, almost as soon as they have been broached, to be not worth discussing after all

We were both reserved by nature, but Kini [Ella Maillart] was the less taciturn. I can only talk nonsense with fluency and conviction, for all serious subjects, and particularly anything to do with myself, seem to me, almost as soon as they have been broached, to be not worth discussing after all; in any case I talk badly. But Kini, in the mood, could talk extremely well and was not restrained from airing her opinions or recalling her past by any inhuman intimation that the former were worthless and the latter was a bore. This was a boon to me, for she had an interesting, rather barbarian mind, and her life had been lived in many places and all sorts of conditions.

P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 173

Here the other side of the observation 

It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese

It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese. In the extreme north-west of China they speak what I take to be a variant of the Shansi dialect. it is not as incomprehensible as the southern dialects, being based closely on mandarin; but it was disconcerting to find (for instance) that 'water' was fi instead of shui, that she-me (meaning 'what') had contracted to sa, and that normen, not wormen, meant 'we'. I found myself, mutatis mutandis, in roughly the position of a Chinese who, after cursorily studying the first chapters of a modern English primer, is turned loose in the remoter parts of eighteenth century Yorkshire.

P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 167

It is an astonishing contrast to be going at fifteen miles a day one day and at fifteen hundred the next

It is an astonishing contrast to be going at fifteen miles a day one day and at fifteen hundred the next. I had so got into the habit of moving at the same rate as people did a thousand years ago, with the camels, that now I found it difficult to realize I was every day flying over new countries inhabited by different races.

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 310

Governing seemed to be a very difficult business.

I said to myself that governing seemed to be a very difficult business. To pay the troops who kept the dictatorship in power the people were heavily taxed and rendered discontented. This was the position in Khotan. On the other hand, when a government tried to conciliate the taxpayers and be reasonable about levies, it ran short of money and the soldiers revolted, leaving the town open to the depredations of mountain bands – Kashgar’s plight! Which was better? Peter was no interested when I raised the point. He was considering an altogether different problem, which was this: who would win an English law case in which a man, suddenly raised to the peerage as Lord Bognor, brings an action against a poet for writing a tragedy with a hero bearing the hitherto unused name, it being essential for the balance of the poet’s lines to retain the name? 

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 257

Peter thought me too serious and I did not understand British humour

We both liked to spend our leisure in the open air, he shooting, I ski-ing. … But then? Peter thought me too serious and I did not understand British humour (a serious a fault in the eyes of an Englishman as is it for a Chinaman to “lose face”). I had the bad taste to lay down the law about the art of living. Peter was bored by my craving to understand the thousands of diverse lives that make up humanity and bored, too, by my need to relate my own life to life in general. How could anybody be so crazy as to want to find out whether men’s efforts brought about an improvement in human nature? Peter was troubled by none of these things. In his imperturbable wisdom he looked on human beings as characters in a comedy.

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 161-2

I loved that primitive way of living which gave one back that hunger that transforms every morsel one puts under one’s tooth into solid satisfaction

Peter’s attitude was one of wonder at discovering the ways of the nomads, ways that are as old as the world. I, on the other hand, was going back to a chapter in my own history. In a sense I was only prolonging the journey I had made in Russian Turkestan. I was familiar with the smell of camels and of their fetid breathing as they ruminated. I had already joined in the halt at the watering-place, already seen the gathering of the dung for fuel. I knew the joy of drinking boiling tea, had assisted in the search for camels that strayed while grazing. I knew the silence at night, when one’s eyes are burning after marching against the wind all day. I loved that primitive way of living which gave one back that hunger that transforms every morsel one puts under one’s tooth into solid satisfaction; the healthy weariness that made sleep an incomparable voluptuousness; and the desire to get on that found realization in every step one took.

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 104

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse, and genuinely thought the difference didn’t matter. If he got past that, he would have discovered writers contentedly using those cribs and ‘substitutes for proper food’ he had excoriated in his 1940 ‘Preface’, tracing his thoughts through flattening, second-hand, language-less and usually wildly incorrect ‘Encylopaedias of Mythology’. The end produce of book after book, meanwhile, is a scheme: The Lord of the Rings reduced to ‘archetypes’, related to solemn trudging plots of ‘departure and return’, ‘initiation, donor and trial’ hutching over banalities like ‘for every good… there is a corresponding evil’.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 381

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land, It includes no bones, is prepared so as to be eaten with chopsticks, triturated, cooked for hours and hours in delicious sauces, and appears at last, looking like a variety of dumplings, served in little heaps in which nothing is whole and entire. Tou-fu, the sole diet of millions of peasants, is a kind of flabby, yellowish custard made with bean flour. 

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 49

Not one person in a thousand realises that rabbit (no Old English source) are in any way historical way distinct from mice or weasels

Rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only around the thirteenth century, as imports bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like mink or coypu. Yet they have been assimilated. The point is this: not one person in a thousand realises that rabbit (no Old English source) are in any way historical way distinct from mice (O.E. mys) or weasels (O.E. weselas), while the word is accepted by all as familiar, native, English.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 78

Tolkein would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot or as Roman Catholic

[Spenser’s] first poem, The Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, was ornamented by the most offensive gloss that Tolkein probably ever encountered. In quick succession this declared that for all its age ‘that rancke opinion of Elfes’ [sic] should be rooted ‘oute of mens hearts’ as being a mistaken form of the Italian faction the ‘Guelfes’, and was in any case a Papistical notion spread by ‘bald Friers and knauish shauelings.’ Tolkein would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot or as Roman Catholic.

 T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 64

You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words

You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words; like place-names or Roman roads or Gothic vowels, they carried quite enough information all by themselves.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 52

Contrived, overblown allegories

Although the king was ostensibly absent from the paintings, every panel above was designed to magnify his authority below. Without his presence they become as they appear to some today – contrived, overblown allegories. But with the King enthroned and his court in attendance, they ceiling represented a brilliant fusion of Catholic Counter-Reformation style with the Protestant symbolism and political imagery of Caroline personal rule.

J. Brotton, The sale of the late King's goods (2006), 171

Charles came to define his royal authority through the awe and silence induced by painting

Charles came to define his royal authority through the awe and silence induced by painting, rather than the books and public disputation cherished by his father, Charles lacked the scholarly erudition of his father, James I, and the ruthless pragmatism of his son, Charles II. His close attention to detail and tendency towards prevarication made him particularly susceptible to the pleasures of collecting, with its absorption in questions of provenance, attribution, style and judgement.

J. Brotton, The sale of the late King's goods (2006), 10

The whole structure indeed of the Silmarillion lost their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance

The reader who has forgotten his genealogies, or forgotten the original embassy to Valinor, or never realised the equation of ‘Dark Elves’ and ‘Moriquendi’ is left at a loss. The tension of the moment, the skewed relation between truth and whole truth, pass him by. And once the thread is lost, the bitter resentment of Angrod seventeen pages later, the cold mood in which Nargothrond is founded by Angrod’s bother Finrod, the whole structure indeed of the Silmarillion lost their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 284

Williams knew how to use television to his advantage

More than any of his contemporaries, [Andy] Williams knew how to use television to his advantage. He sang ‘Moon River’ at the 1962 Academy Awards show, which was watched by more than forty million people; he then made sure it wasn’t released as a single in spite of the huge demand, and smiled to himself as hundreds of thousands of his Moon River and other great movie themes LP flew out of the shops, all retailing at three times the price of a 45. The industry gave him a round of applause.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 525

It’s not about being smart, it’s about being alive

Rogers and Hammerstein changed Broadway. They took it forward by making it less a geographical location where hits were born, and more a standalone genre with new rules and regulations. With their exotic but defiantly non-metropolitan locations, they also took it back to a time when the book drove the songs, back to the time of light opera and operetta. … Certainly, ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ didn’t have the urban smarts of Rogers and Hart, but as Sondheim himself later responded, ‘It’s not about being smart, it’s about being alive.’

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 436

Fats Waller apparently had it written into his contract that he could not be forced to play boogie-woogie

But not everyone was a fan. Fats Waller apparently had it written into his contract that he could not be forced to play boogie-woogie. He considered it cheap and unmusical, all repetition and lacking in harmonics.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 331

No one wanted to kill him; they just wanted him to play the piano

[Fats] Waller’s playing was so special that it became a threat to his own safety. Leaving a show in Chicago in 1926, he was grabbed and bundled into a car, then ordered inside a place called the Hawthorne Inn with a gun in his back. Sweating, terrified, he was rather surprised to be pushed through the doors and find a party in full swing. He was the unwitting ‘surprise guest’ at Al Capone’s birthday bash. No one wanted to kill him; they just wanted him to play the piano. Making the most of a tricky situation, Waller stayed at the Hawthorne Inn for three days, drank the place dry and earned thousands of dollars in cash-money tips from Capone and his cronies.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 265

It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now

It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now. His hugeness can be proven with science. During the war, his radio programmes attracted fifty million listeners in America. Of the five highest-grossing Hollywood movies in 1946, three of them – The Bells of St Mary’s, Blue Skies, Road to Utopia – starred Bing Crosby; he was the number one box office star for five years straight, from 1944 to 1948. He recorded nearly four hundred hit singles, an achievement no-one – not Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Beyonce or Kanye West – has come remotely close to matching, and probably no one ever will.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 220

No one would have guessed back in 1912, when it first made its presence known on vaudeville stages, that the blues would become one of the defining sounds of the twentieth century

No one would have guessed back in 1912, when it first made its presence known on vaudeville stages, that the blues would become one of the defining sounds of the twentieth century. No one in the nascent music industry thought of it then as anything more than a fad, a subset of ragtime even, only with a bunch of guitar or banjo notes played together and a vocal style that hovered around a tune, occasionally hitting the note, but more commonly sounding like a moan.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 139

This was a high water mark for musical theatre – for great American songwriting, even

In 1927, within a few blocks of Showboat you could have also seen George and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face, Vincent Youman’s Hit the Deck or Rogers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee. This was a high water mark for musical theatre – for great American songwriting, even – but then two things come along to spoil the fun: the Wall Street Crash and talking pictures. In 1928 there were sixty-two shows along Broadway; this would decline to thirty-four in 1931. During the whole of the 1930s, the Great White Way would  host only sixty-eight new musical comedies.

With a very real lack of cash and opportunity for the New York songwriter, the lure of Hollywood – just about the only place in 1930s America where there seemed to be a silver lining – would prove irresistible.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 110

No-one had previously been aware that red-hot mamas were endangered

No singer was more indicative of America’s new found effervescence than the insatiable Sophie Tucker, who emerged in 1912, aged twenty-six, as ‘The Last of the Red Hot Mamas’, though no-one had previously been aware that red-hot mamas were endangered.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 40

The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for

'But ... I'm totally unprepared! I have no luggage with me, no nothing.'

'None of us do. We none of us expected this. That is, in general, the nature of adventures. Adventurers tend to smell. The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for.' 

K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023), 111-2

Some sentences have the power to change everything

Some sentences have the power to change everything. They are the usual suspects: I love you , I hate you , I'm pregnant, I'm dying, I regret to tell you that this country is at war. But the words with the greatest power to create both havoc and marvels are these:

'I need your help.'

K. Rundell, Impossible creatures (2023), 57

He was flagrantly lacking in public spirit

The fact is that every large school requires an advocatus diaboli - and at Castrevenford Mr Etherege occupied this important post. He was flagrantly lacking in public spirit. He never attended important matches. He was not interested in the spiritual welfare of his boys. He lacked respect for the school as an institution. In short, he was impenitently an individualist. And if, at first sight, these characteristics do not appear particularly commendable, you must remember the context. In a school like Castrevenford a good deal of emphasis is necessarily laid on public spirit, and the thing is liable to develop, if unregulated into a rather dreary fetish. Mr Etherege helped to keep this peril at bay. 

E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948), 22

He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie

He invariably found Miss Parry's efficiency a little daunting. He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie, organizing charity bazaars, visiting the sick and impoverished , training callow maidservants, implacably gardening. Some freak of destiny into which he had never enquired had compelled Miss Parry to forsake this orbit in search of a living, but its atmosphere still clung to her.

E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948), 8