Autobiographers From The United Kingdom

"Find a cosy table Inside a restaurant, Somewhere formidable Where you’ll be très contents. Let your lady fair know That she is all you see, Prime her with a Pernod Or three. Watch her crack a lobster And strip it to the buff, Rough as when a mobster Gets tough. Keep the wine cascading And you’ll ensure Une petite spécialité called l’amour...."

"Oh, love, love, love — Love on a hilltop high, Love against a cloudless sky, Love where the scene is Painted by a million stars, Love with martinis In the cabarets and bars. Oh, love, love, love..."

"Sit like a fool then, crassly emptying Glass after wineglass in some foul tavern, Watching the night and its candles gutter, Snoring at sunrise. In England now the wind blows high And clouds brush rudely at the sky; The blood runs thinly through my frame, I half-caress the hearthstone’s flame, Oppressed by autumn’s desolate cry. Then homesick for the south am I, For where the lucky swallows fly, But each warm land is just a name In England now. The luckless workers I espy With chins dipped low and collars high, Walk into winter, do not blame The shifting globe. A gust of shame Represses my unmanly sigh In England now."

"The Christians are right when they render unto Caesar and unto God but keep the two tributes apart. All rule must be secular. When God enters politics, he turns into his opposite. Always has. Always will."

"Oh come, Caesar, art is for the impotent....Why dream when it's more satisfactory to be awake. The reality is potestas."

"...whereas the vices of Messalina were in themselves venial, being mostly a passion for sensual gratification which subordinated all things to its encompassing, Agrippina lived solely for power, frightening enough in a man but terrifying in a woman....she would sleep with anyone, though not for physical pleasure, only for political advantage. She was cursed or blessed with a certain sexual coldness, knowing as much as a temple prostitute about the arousing of male passion and the procurement of its ecstatic release but keeping herself aloof, despite an occasional simulation of desire and the odd false orgiastic shudder and scream of fulfilment, from a process she found distressingly bestial when it was not frankly comic."

"‘....There was a good deal of drunkenness - … There was lechery, nakedness. It was a warm afternoon,’ he added, as if to excuse the nakedness.... ‘I saw the ceremony between the Empress and Gaius Silius and I assumed it was all a game. There was a great deal of laughter and little solemnity. Then the marriage or mock marriage was .... consummated at once and in public. And, in sympathy as it were, the other guests - A great mass of naked bodies. Men and women. Fornication for them. There were boys there too, Ganymedes. .... ‘And when does Gaius Silius think he can strike the blow that will secure him the imperial c -’ I do not think,’ Narcissus said, ‘that Gaius Silius has such an ambition. He is a weak man besotted by the erotic, no more.’"

"Few men can do more than touch the fringes of a woman's satisfaction."

"God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses."

"‘You served here how long, Cornelius?’ ‘Long enough to learn about what they believe. Not long enough to learn to speak their language well enough to get their confidence. Not long enough to learn how to read their books. Now I’ve three years before retirement and a measure of spare time for getting down to it.’ ‘This, you know,’ Marcellus said, ‘is all wrong. You’re not here to get their confidence or read their books. They’re a colonized people. We’re here to give orders. ‘They’d rather die than obey some of the Roman orders. Besides, it’s laid down that their religion is inviolate...’"

"I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised."

"Despite Jesus's appearance on the earth to preach the doctrine of love, and despite the stout work of his disciples (all put to death in curiously ludic ways by the serious), it cannot be said that the kingdom of heaven he promised as a reward for love is as yet likely to overtake the kingdom of the serious, which we also may call the kingdom of Caesar."

"…love…In all languages the word is treacherous and hard to define."

"Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things."

"And now," Herod calmly said, "You can kill all the new-born....Kill them all....take your men and let your men take their swords. Make sure they're sharp. To Bethlehem. Hack. Lunge. Chop. Kill."

"…it is not easy to mark the boundaries of politics and religion."

"Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it..."

"I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit.... I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance..."

"Goebbels...now made an applauded entrance. He was no man to improvise a word or two of greeting; he had typewritten sheets.... He spoke of the cinema as the popular voice of the state...those products, themselves a means of cleansing the world film market through their purity and excellence of the regrettable decadent ordures excreted by international Jewry...."

"When we arrived at New York I went, straight after clearing customs, to the Algonquin Hotel. I would not claim as of right a room in my own flat, since Hortense must now regard it as hers. After a couple of whisky sours in the Blue Bar I walked up Fifth Avenue. The September heat was intense and the air was all woollen shirts aboil. The town was full of jumbo steaks and ice cream, the shops pleaded that we buy useless gadgets. This was not Europe. This was very far from being Europe. Victory in Europe and Asia confirmed the excellence of the American way of life. Strong appetite and inviolable health. The afternoon sun was higher here than in any town of Europe, forced upwards by the skyscrapers. The place was rife with life."

"And now, as so often happened, my brain in a fever took over the datum of the dream and enriched and expanded it. Norman Douglas spoke pedantically on behalf of the buggers. `We have this right, you see, to shove it up. On a road to Capri I found a postman who had fallen off his bicycle, you see, unconscious, somewhat concussed. He lay in exactly the right position. I buggered him with athletic swiftness: he would come to and feel none the worse.’ The Home Secretary nodded sympathetically while the rain wept on to him in Old Palace Yard. `I mean, minors. I mean, there’d be little in it for us if you restricted the act to consenting males over, say, eighteen. Boys are so pliable, so exquisitely sodomizable. You do see that, don’t you, old man?’ The Home Secretary nodded as if to say: Of course, old public-school man myself, old boy. I saw a lot of known faces, Pearson, Tyrwit, Lewis, Charlton, James, all most reasonable, claiming the legal right to maul and suck and bugger. I put myself in the gathering and said, also most reasonable, that it was nothing to do with the law: you were still left with the ethics and theology of the thing. What we had a right to desire was love, and nothing hindered that right. Oh nonsense, he’s such a bore. As for theology, isn’t there that apocryphal book of the Bible in which heterosexuality is represented as the primal curse?"

"...Carlo delivered what began as a panegyric and ended as an anathema....His brother...regarded by the stupid and the wicked as a sort of imbecilic weakness, an infantile inability to come to terms with the sophisticated world of affairs. Because he was just he was to be seen as a quixotic madman, because he was virtuous he was to be taken for a eunuch, because he was magnanimous he was to be gulled and derided.... ‘There are many here today in this great modern temple of the Lord who have come not out of the piety of friendship or respect but following sickening forms of hypocritical convention, and among these are some that are soiled, bemerded, stinking with wealth amassed unjustly, wealth made out of torture and murder and the exploitation of human frailty, a precarious wealth as insubstantial as fairy gold, demon gold rather, that will crumble into dust at the dawn of the recovery of sanity and virtue by a great nation temporarily demented, an angelic land to its immigrants that is now set upon by the devils of greed, stupidity and madness...’"

"Carlo looked as at the world of fallen man on the endless suburbs that passed for a city, an eatery in the likeness of a Sphinx (enter between its forepaws), another, for jumbo malts so thick you can't suck 'em through a straw, in the form of an elephant crouched as at the bidding of its mahout, gimcrack temples of various faiths, attap roofs of nutburger stands with Corinthian columns, loans loans loans, stores crammed with cutprice radios, a doughnuttery, homes like Swiss chalets, like Bavarian castles, miniature Blenheims, Strawberry Hills, Taj Mahals, a bank in the form of a tiny ocean liner, dusty trees on the boulevards (datepalm, orange, oleander), bars with neon bottles endlessly pouring, colleges for stuntmen, beauticians, morticians, degrees in drummajoretteship."

"We," he said, not without complacency, "are different. We attest the divine paradox. We are barren only to be fertile. We proclaim the primary reality of the world of the spirit which has an infinitude of mansions for an infinitude of human souls. And you too are different. Your destiny is of the rarest kind. You will live to proclaim the love of Christ for man and man for Christ in a figure of earthly love." Preacher's rhetoric; it would have been better in Italian, which thrives on melodious meaninglessness. I said, with the same weariness as before, "My destiny is to live in a state of desire both church and state condemn and to grow sourly rich in the purveying of a debased commodity. I've just finished a novel which, when I'd read it through in typescript, made me feel sick to my stomach. And yet it's what people want -- the evocation of a past golden time when there was no Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, when gods were paid for with sovereigns, Elgar's Symphony Number One in A flat trumpeted noblimente a massive hope in the future, and the romantic love of a shopgirl and a younger son of the aristocracy portended a healthful inflection but not destruction of the inherited social pattern. Comic servants and imperious duchesses. Hansom cabs and racing at Ascot. Fascists and democrats alike will love it. My destiny is to create a kind of underliterature that lacks all whiff of the subversive." "Don't," Carlo said, "underestimate yourself."

"...in the bar, he treated me and all around us to a loud recapitulation, based loosely on the visas and entry permits in his passport, of the more scandalous elements of our life together. ‘New York, dear, and that pissyarsed publisher of yours who tried to stop me going to the fistfuck party, dangerous he said, lethal, stupid sod. Toronto, that was where we had that little whatsit at the same time, remember, lovely kind of henna colour, half Indian, half French, not an ounce of bloody Anglosaxon blood remember.’ He got drunk very rapidly on undiluted Pernod. ‘The man on the Washington Post who once had it off with a ghost. At the..."

"...To the mother hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: ‘It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you’re the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other.’ He did a comic oenophil act with the bottle of Marsovin..."

"I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not."

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

"The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism....But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour....Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam."

"...who will show us God now? The Christians? Christianity was abolished by the Second Vatican Council. The Jews? They worship a bloody tribal deity....Then I saw how Islam contained everything and yet was as simple and sharp and bright as a sword. I had dreamt of no Islamic revolution in Britain but rather of a slow conversion, helped by an Islamic infiltration..."

"...a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture."

"'We're in control, and we have what we want!'"

"'Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.'"

"'But what happens when you die?' 'You’re finished with,' Enderby said promptly. 'Done for. And even if you weren’t – well, you die then, gasp your last, then you’re sort of wandering, free of body. You wander around and then you come in contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like.'"

"The important thing is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen."

"‘The lure of Egypt, gentlemen, and the greater exotic lure of the lands beyond. The East – does not our way lie there? Europe shall, after tomorrow, be wholly ours. We do not wish America or Africa, shapeless savage continents with no future. But ah, the East. India, China, fabulous Japan. And, of course,’ with a fierce savagery replacing the mystic look, ‘we have the mission of striking at the enemy of mankind in that very East where he has so precarious a toehold –’"

"There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say."

"And then there were the sick to be transported back to Cairo (where already the holy war might have spread like the bubonic and smiling beards above gelder’s knives be waiting at the gates), and how in the name of filthy castrating Allah did you march men back through the Sinai who couldn’t even sit a mule? He reviewed the sweating patients in gloom, all distorted with bubos…"

"The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy."

"'Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.'"

"'As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.'"

"'It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.'"

"'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'"

"'How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.'"

"I had a Les Paul before Eric but I didn't have a Marshall. And when Eric got all of that together he was a delight to listen to. He really understood the blues."

"His fingers are directly wired to his soul."

"I think Clapton is brilliant. He's the only one who moved me. The only one who made me want to play the guitar."

"An electric warrior reinvented as the modern icon of acoustic blues, Slowhand has the whole package: tone, technique, reverence for the source material, everything. Obviously, when one of the greatest guitarists of all time sits down to play you know you’re in for something special, but there’s something about the way Clapton affects the listener that sets him apart. His journey from young guitar god to elder blues statesman has been epic, and it’s inarguably his acoustic side that has propped up the second half of his career. Clapton is God? Maybe not, but he’s certainly all class."

"During the mid Sixties, [Clapton's] legendary performances with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Cream established him as a pioneer of the modern electric blues and rock guitar. [...] Regardless of the musical format, Eric Clapton has always kept his brilliant blues-inspired guitar playing in the forefront, influencing the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Steve Lukather, Joe Satriani, Jonny Lang and countless others."

"He is a great person, as well as a great musician. And this guy sings like he was born down below Mississippi!"