To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.

God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.

One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.