That Somerset Maugham anthology Cakes and Ale. How destructive he is, venomous, pulling everything down in biting, corrosive cynicism. Yet somewhere … - Ida Friederike Görres

I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro...and , of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i.e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade.

one's twentieth birthday. That day opened the door to a wider life: I reached out to grasp reality. But in fact it was reality which gripped me with its restrictions and constraints and rules which arrogantly claim to be the laws of life, of the universe. To be grown-up really meant resignation; one gave in (if ruefully), laughing a little at one's young dreams.

Humanly speaking the Church as a whole will never cut a good figure, and her exceptions seem almost like another species.