England can best express her passionate will to peace by proposing something concrete to solve present difficulties. To show ourselves generous and s… - Lord David Cecil

Comedy was implicit in the manner in which she <nowiki>[</nowiki>Jane Austen<nowiki>]</nowiki> told her story. Her irony, her delicate ruthless irony, was of the substance of her style. It never obtruded itself; sometimes it only glinted out in a turn of phrase. But it was never absent for more than a paragraph; and her most straightforward piece of exposition was tart with its perfume.

I cannot recall a time when stories and rhymes and pictures and tunes were not for me the chief source of interest and pleasure in life. I stress the word pleasure. Pleasure has played a large part in my life; pleasure, solitary and sociable, carnal or spiritual; pleasure in the beauties of art and nature, in the enthralling variety of the human scene; and pleasure in jokes. Nothing has been included here, however interesting its subject matter, which does not also give me pleasure.

That city <nowiki>[</nowiki>Oxford<nowiki>]</nowiki> is one of the few supreme monuments of European history and civilization, the English equivalent of Florence or Venice.