read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.