A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore - on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium.

Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed.

It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.

Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.