We learn (say) that Philip Larkin was most unadmirable in person, mean, sour, woman-despising, racist etc. And - since we unthinkingly embrace what C.S. Lewis called "the Personal Heresy", whereby the "Life" and the "Works" are "simply two diverse expressions of this single quiddity" - we can no longer admire and enjoy his poems (but for which no one would have written a biography of him, or edited his letters) because, despite what we may say to the contrary, we don't really believe that a bastard like that could write perfectly shaped, plangent lyrics. We should ask ourselves someone who wrote such poems could ever be such a bastard. Why don't we? Because we trust the biography or the letters more than the work, although the work comes from deep down in the man while the best biography...

I found myself writing restaurant reviews in Harpers & Queen magazine. In a moment of self-doubt, I said to George Melly, who had been doing the film reviews for the Observer, "I'm sure they're going to find out one day that I know nothing about it." His answer was convoluted but true: "Yes, but in my experience, by the time they find out you know nothing about it, you will know something about it."Humphrey Lyttelton, It Just Occurred To Me: The Reminiscences & Thoughts of Chairman......

In no other part of Europe, I think, can you walk for ten hours, and always remain at the same place, as if in a nightmare: always with the same straight road in front of you, stretching to the horizon, always the same steppe and forests to the other horizon, like a ship's wake; not a village, or a house or smoke, or a milestone to show in some way that a bit of space has been conquered; not a living creature to meet, except for flights of crows and an occasional hawk cruising idly in the wind. Primo Levi, The......

There were very few, if any, Negro undergraduates, but Asiatics abounded, and these were usually referred to as "black men" whether they were pale Egyptians or dusky Tamils. There was no rancour in the appellation; it was simply that these exotics seemed as absurd among the stones of Oxford as topeed tourists in the temples and mosques of the orient; there was no hint of deliberate personal contempt; still less of hostility. It struck us as whimsical to impute cannibalism to these earnest vegetarians. We may have caused offence.Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning....

Now, evening in the cell, I have been thinking back on the regime's interest in beauty, which in fact was very marked. The ruthlessness and inhumanity of the regime went hand in hand with a remarkable feeling for beauty, for the virginal and unspoiled, although that feeling often degenerated into the sentimentality of a postcard idyll. Today I sometimes read statements to the effect that all this was merely camouflage, a calculated manoeuvre to distract the attention of the suppressed masses. But that was not so. Of course the regime's craving for beauty also had to do with Hitler's personal taste, with his hatred for the modern world, his fear of the future. But there was also an unselfish social impulse at work, an effort to reconcile the unavoidable ugliness of the technological world...

"I was a preacher," said the man seriously. "Reverend Jim Casy - was a Burning Busher. Used to howl out the name of Jesus to glory. And used to get an irrigation ditch so squirmin' full of repented sinners half of 'em like to drownded. But not no more," he sighed. "Just Jim Casy now. Ain't got the call no more. Got a lot of sinful idears - but they seem kinda sensible." John Steinbeck, The Grapes of......

German mortar bombs were exploding in the middle of a small square only a hundred yards from Security Headquarters. Here I saw an ugly sight: a British officer  interrogating an Italian civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with a chair; treatment which the Italian, his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called in a private of the Hampshires and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, "Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?" The private’s reply was to spit on his hands, and say, "I don’t mind if I do, sir." The most revolting episode I have seen since joining the forces. Norman Lewis, Naples ’44....

For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass......

I knew everything about my friends' political and religious opinions, their love affairs, finances, homes, families, their taste in food and clothes and drink, but would have thought it indelicate to inquire what school they were reading. English literature was for women and foreigners, a new, disreputable school called Modern Greats (now dubbed P.P.E.) was for "publicists and politicians". Classical Mods and Greats was still pre-eminent in esteem; next to them Modern History and Law and Theology. Mathematicians were respected but were thought to be out of their proper milieu; they should have been at Cambridge. There was said to be a laboratory somewhere beyond Keble, but I never met anyone who dabbled there.Evelyn Waugh, A Little......