English travellers ... do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels

And it was queer how everyone expressed it in almost the same words: 'The atmosphere of this place - it's horrible. Like being in a lunatic asylum.' But perhaps I ought not to say everyone. Some of the English visitors who flitted briefly through Spain, from hotel to hotel, seem not to have noticed that there was anything wrong with the general atmosphere. The Duchess of Atholl writes, I notice (Sunday Express, 17 October 1937): 

I was in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona ... perfect order prevailed in all three towns without any display of force. All the hotels in which I stayed were not only 'normal' and 'decent', but extremely comfortable, in spite of the shortage of butter and coffee. 

It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels. I hope they found some butter for the Duchess of Atholl. 

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 159

I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all

No one I met at this time - doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients - failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 153-4

They seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain

Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain - which political party they belonged to. They thought they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.

G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), 84-85

Language is what you pick up naturally - everyone speaks, no problem - but science has to be learned methodically

My eager schoolteacher abandoned science to nature, assuming we would absorb the essentials through inquisitive play. Language, he used to say, was what made us different from the apes, and that was what he wanted to teach. But from my Mister Salgado I learned the reverse: language is what you pick up naturally - everyone speaks, no problem - but science has to be learned methodically, by study, if one is ever to emerge out of the swamp of our psychotic superstitions. It is what transforms our lives.

R. Gunesekera, Reef (1994), Kindle edn. loc 657

Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome

[Churchill] had been a man not only whose intimate links with history ran back to the last cavalry charge at Omdurman, in the year of the death of Gladstone - but whose lifespan connected the present with that of millions who had been contemporary with Palmerston and Peel and the Duke of Wellington, and even with hundreds of thousands still alive in his youth, who had lived in the time of Napoleon, Beethoven and George III. In Britain's last great crisis as an imperial world power, Churchill had stood out like Justinian in the twilight of Rome, as a man who derived his majesty from a sense of imperial and military splendour of the past

Christopher Booker, in R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 490

With one crushing stomp of its platform soles

As Electric Warrior and Ziggy Stardust, Bolan and Bowie were far more effective Pied Pipers than Donovan, transporting their young listeners from immersion in a speculative, mythological past, and repositioning pop music in a future of plastic, glitter and tin ... With one crushing stomp of its platform soles, glam wiped out the market value of British rock's Arcadian dreams.

R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 474

The global village would become a society suspicious of outsiders and intolerant of out-of-step behaviour

The global village, in its original context in McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, was not an example of gleeful futurology. It was a warning. The global village would become, as real villagers often are, a society suspicious of outsiders and intolerant of out-of-step behaviour. McLuhan foresaw with horror the approaching end of print culture, with its privileging of the individual conscious voice. 

R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 377