We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.

The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad.

The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.

Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.