Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

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

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food . . . of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns. . . . He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods . . . endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.