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