The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep’s wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I l… - Laurie Lee

Of course, there is one great virtue in size; and of course, London is the greatest show on earth, for never have so many human characters been gathered together in one place. Here, in a day, you can see the world. Stand at the entrance to a main-line railway station, during the rush-hour, and you see every possible human species scurrying past. One becomes amazed and transported by the multiplicity of the human face, by its infinite differences, by its almost prismatic graduations from ugliness to beauty, evil to good.

It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed - all one needs is the original thirst.

At other times the daughter, heart-stoppingly voluptuous in her tight Californian pants, would lead me by the hand through the ruined garden, to the last clump of still rooted myrtles, then crouch, bare-kneed, and pull me down beside her, and demand to know my ideological convictions. Beautiful Cleo; she never knew what she did to me, her eyes slanting under the myrtle leaves, her coiled russet limbs like something from a Rousseau jungle, her chatter never still for a moment. But not of what I expected; never a word about love, or my hunger, or the summer night.