I lunched with Mary Bartlett at the Étoile. She showed me the tongue motion that women make when they are cleaning lipstick off their front teeth and I feel that I have gained a valuable piece of information. (The Siren Years, Charles Ritchie)
In our house, we sometimes look at our belongings and remind ourselves: “One day, all of this will be packed into boxes and taken to a charity shop”. (Julian Baggini, FTWeekend)
“In my day any fool could get into Eton, and any fool did.” (Colin Thubron, aet 82)
“I used to see a shrink, I don’t any more,” Paxman says. “I couldn’t see any point. They couldn’t turn the bad news into good news. But all this has made me think a lot about religion. You’re the right person to talk to about this, of course.”
I tell him that my father, who also had Parkinson’s, would occasionally hallucinate when he was further down the line. After one episode he asked me if I thought it possible he had met God. Yes, I said, but he was not given to flights of fancy so I asked him how he knew that it was God — and he said he was wearing an Old Etonian tie. (Rev Richard Coles interviewing Jeremy Paxman in The Sunday Times Magazine)
There are two fundamental causes of madness amongst students: sexual frustration and the study of coinage. (Perhaps an Austrian proverb)
An innocent man ought not to run an equal risk with with a guilty one. (Samuel Richardson on duelling in Clarissa)
At his funeral the crane-drivers had to be paid overtime to bow their cranes as his coffin passed. (Ferdinand Mount, reviewing Churchill’s Shadow; An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Oldie)
