Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.