Monday, 30 July 2018

Subsisting on a handful of dates and occasional sip of camel's piss

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The sort of man who will happily walk barefoot for months across a waterless desert, subsisting on a handful of dates and occasional sip of ...
Sunday, 29 July 2018

I thought it sounded a deadly, deadly dull country to live in

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In his seventies he said: 'I imagined that England was like India. I was very disappointed when my father told me that, in England, ther...
Thursday, 14 June 2018

Richelieu omitted to mention those little items of the five-million-a-year income

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In describing himself as a Promethean saviour, a voluntary scapegoat for the suffering of the people, Richelieu omitted to mention those li...
Wednesday, 13 June 2018

These pleasant, friendly people ... they were all heretics, and therefore irrevocably doomed

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He enjoyed himself in England, and he liked the English. And precisely because he like them, his happy exhilaration at being among them eva...
Tuesday, 12 June 2018

Now her descendant did not know what a napkin ring was

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It has come to this. Time was, that life could not proceed appropriately for a family such as my grandmother's without ownership of sau...
Monday, 11 June 2018

One of the worst plights of the twentieth century has been to be Russian - at any point

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One of the worst plights of the twentieth century has been to be Russian - at any point. They fought in the Great War with the other Allies...
Sunday, 10 June 2018

Two powerful forces of enlightenment - television and general mobility

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Peering back into the 1940s, it is difficult to realize how deeply polarized society was then - even for one who was around at the time and...