I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your … - Rebecca West

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.

The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.