What fascinates people isn’t policy- who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people- the detail of another person’s life.
Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.
Officially it was almost spring but someone had forgotten to pass the news on to winter.
The corridor was grand and lofty in the Victorian imperial style, its extravagance calculated to awe those visitors whose misfortune it was not to be born British.
A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.
I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.
Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.
The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: ‘What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things.
Let us drink to pointless heroism.
Violence crackled around him in the dry air, like static electricity.
The Spartan statesman Lycurgus, seven hundred years ago, is said to have observed: When falls on man the anger of the gods, First from his mind they banish understanding. Such was to be the fate of Caesar. I am sure Cicero was correct: he had gone mad. His success had made him vain, and his vanity had devoured his reason.
His theory of oratory, the exact opposite of the Asiatics’, was simple: don’t move about too much, hold your head straight, stick to the point, make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, and when you’ve won their sympathy, sit down quickly –.
Well, well – be careful of what questions you ask, for fear of what answers you may receive.
There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events.
What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.
All that will remain of us is what is written down.
I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.
But it is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises;.
History was a patchwork of voids. The great university libraries and public archives had mostly rotted away or been used as fuel in the Dark Age. An entire generation’s correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called ‘The Cloud’.
The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed.