Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."