Quotations

Shusha Guppy:

"This relates to what you once said, that “Books are not life, only its ashes.” Do you still believe that?"

Marguerite Yourcenar:

"Yes, but books are also a way of learning to feel more acutely. Writing is a way of going to the depth of Being."

Paris Review

"My husband has a theory that people who go to Oxford and Cambridge think their work is done when they get their A-levels and so are less likely to achieve success or happiness when real life begins."
Christina Hopkins, Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2021

"History is never kind to those who expect anything of her." Lawrence Durrell

“He who marches out of line hears another drum.” Ken Kesey

"Here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the mind and death. And why? For what purpose? It is all a darkness." Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915). I read that novel a few years ago and found it very dull.

"What the three Anglosphere states in the Aukus pact have put together is a loose, flexible and nimble arrangement for managing Indo-Pacific security directly. This is something that is second nature to states of a culture that General de Gaulle always referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. It is just the kind of arrangement that is anathema to the formal, rational and legalistic method of the French and their cultural offshoot the EU, whose modus operandi was best demonstrated by the glacial formalism applied to the Brexit negotiations.

"This clash of cultures – or cultures at cross purposes – was demonstrated prior to the First World War, when following the 1904 informal Entente Cordiale France was desperate for a formal binding written commitment from London to side with her in the event of a German attack. Britain would only agree to wait and see. This was a problem France also experienced in the interwar years."

John Keiger

"In November 2010, the Daily Express become the first national newspaper to back the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Instigating this shift was the paper’s chief political commentator, Patrick O’Flynn. “Fellow hacks in Fleet Street and lobby laughed at him,” remembers the Conservative Home (and later Brexit Central) journalist, Jonathan Isaby, “and thought he was out of his mind for suggesting what — within six years — actually happened.”
Graham Stewart, The Critic, The revolution might not be televised

“We all moaned about how tired we were and would it please stop,” Brexit’s chronicler Tim Shipman recalls of the 2016-2019 battle of wills. “But in 20 years’ time, when we’re looking back, I don’t think there’ll be any one of us who doesn’t think ‘these were the glory years.’”

Ibid.