Memoirists From England

"The organ pealed forth, though never except in fiction does it do this, rather blaring and bursting, or in more refined cases quavering. In every heart began to spring that exquisite hope, seldom if ever realised, that the bride will have had a fit, or eloped with someone else."

"Laura looked up at the shelf of her novels, with Adrian Coates's name on their backs. She had been lucky, she thought, to fail into the hands of so agreeable and helpful a publisher. ... So in time her first story went to Adrian, who recognising in it a touch of good badness almost amounting to genius, gave her a contract for two more."

"Doris Phipps and Lily-Annie Pollett, though they looked incredibly plain and depraved in oyster satin blouses, tight-seated, bell-bottomed trousers, red nails on dirty hands, greasy curls hanging on their shoulders, a cigarette for ever glued to their lips, were really very nice, kind girls."

"Since the conquest of the city by Arungzebe, Moosulman architecture has reared its light and elegant erections, amid the more heavy and less tasteful structures of Hindu creation. From a mosque, built upon the ruins of a heathen temple, spring those celebrated minarets, which now rank amid the wonders of the city. Their lofty spires shoot up into the golden sky from a dense cluster of buildings, crowning the barbaric pomp below with graceful beauty."

"At Allahabad, on the celebration of the Mohurrum, some of the leading persons repaired to the judge to request that the Hindoos, who were about to perform some of their idolatrous worship, should not be permitted to blow their trumpets, and beat their drums, and bring their heathenish devices in contact with the sad and holy solemnity, the manifestations of their grief for the death of the Imaums. They represented, in the most lively manner, the obligation which Christians were under to support the worshippers of the true God against infidels, and were not satisfied with the assurance that they should not be molested by the intermixture of the processions, which should be strictly confined to opposite sides of the city. The Hindoos were equally tenacious in upholding their rights, and it became neceuary to draw out the troopa for the prevention of bloodshed."

"The art in which, unhappily, quick and clever urchins attain the highest degree of proficiency, is that of scolding. The Hindostanee vocabulary is peculiarly rich in terms of abuse ; native Indian women, it is said, excel the females of every other country in volubility of utterance, and in the strength and number of the opprobrious epithets which they shower down upon those who raise their ire. They can declaim for five minutes at a time without once drawing breath; and the shrillness of their voices adds considerably to the effect of their eloquence."

"The ornaments worn by Hindostanee females are, generally speaking, very tasteful and elegant; the pattern of the double joomka ear-rings has been borrowed by European jewellers, and bracelets resembling the Indian bangle are now very common; but the splendid necklaces, so richly carved as to glitter like precious stones, are more rarely seen ; they are formed of a series of drops beautifully wrought and suspended from a closely-linked gold chain of exquisite workmanship."

"What still puzzles some people is that so many old-fashioned Tories should have fallen for such a seedy, treacherous chancer. In fact, I think [[Boris Johnson|[Boris] Johnson]] has succeeded because of his amorality, not despite it. The transgressive sayer of the unsayable breaks through the carapace of conventional politics with a mixture of humour and vituperation, slang and high-flown rhodomontade. Clowning is part of the act for the leader who wants to reach beyond good and evil in the fashion Nietzsche recommended. A cartoon Superman? Yes, but they all are. See Charlie Chaplin, passim. How long will he last – five weeks, five years? I have no idea. All I can say is what I see. And it is not a pretty sight."

"The purpose of sketching out these half-dozen areas of risk is not to claim to know how bad they would turn out to be, but simply to point out how little thought the Brexotics have given to them, or to the suspicions and fears they have roused, not just in their own country but across the whole continent. There remains the last and to me the worst suspicion: that they would be quite happy to put their supposedly beloved country through a period of prolonged turmoil and stagnation simply for the exhilaration of being on their own at last."

"The one reason that I could not ignore, the one reason that grew deep inside me till it consumed me with guilt, was the realisation that I was abusing my faith for a mere political project. After learning in prison that Islamism was not the religion of Islam, but rather a political ideology dressed up as Islam, I no longer felt guilty simply for criticising a political system inspired by modern European constructs, while justified by seventh-century norms."

"If the dangers of racism are apparent, even in a non-violent form, then it was the same for Islamism. Communalist identity politics, self-segregation and group-think are far more damaging to societies in the long run than the odd bomb going off here or there, because it is such a milieu that keeps breeding bomb-makers."

"As he continued to talk to me, I realized one of the fundamental points about Islamism that so many people fail to understand. The way Osman was speaking wasn’t in the orthodox, religious way of the imam with a stick; he was talking about politics, about events that were happening now. That’s crucial to understanding what Islamism is all about: it isn’t a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences."

"There are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of Al-Qaeda without the terrorism."

"Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is the politicisation of Islam, the desire to impose a version of this ancient faith over society."

"There is a disproportionate number of convicted terrorists who've come from a conversion background"

"In today’s Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest among us are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities’ constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming."

"A certain neoorientalism has crept upon us, partly in reaction to the failed militarism of the neo-conservative years, but mainly attributable to historical self-critical attitudes towards the British Empire. This neo-orientalism interprets liberalism as a Western construct ill-fitting to non-Western cultures. Struggling, dissenting liberals within minority community contexts find that they have no greater enemy than these neo-orientalists who lend credence to the idea that they are somehow an inauthentic expression of their ‘native’ culture."

"I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion. What I mean by Islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society. Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of Islam and that's what I adopted. I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the UK. I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs. On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old. I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter. I joined a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on. … It's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that ISIS has laid claim to. But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term. I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause. … I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal. Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the Who's Who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood. When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth." Of course, when ISIS eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now."

"For if liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation and free speech over offense."

"I didn't imagine sharing a panel with a former neo-Nazi, because, of course, I joined the group I did, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, at 16 after being chased in the streets by [the right-wing extremist group] Combat 18, and being stabbed."

"What we've come to realise is those two extremes - far-right fascism and Islamist extremism - have a symbiotic relationship, where they mutually reinforce the other's very generalised view of the other, and they feed off each other's propaganda."

"[The Prevent definition of Islamism is] so broad that it fails to distinguish between Islamists and politically active Muslims inspired by Islam"

"It slowly dawned on me that what I had been propagating was far from true Islam. The more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became."

"THOUGH the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred to cover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on her own brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly that her husband had ordered to meet her."

"The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other"

"Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we'll hope for the best."

"Oh ye! who all life's energies combine The fadeless laurel round your brows to twine, Pause but one moment in your brief career, Nor seek for glory in a mortal sphere."

"She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to."

"The police case was very simple, because the robbers had been caught in the act of shifting the bullion; and as gold bars are more valuable than human lives, the robbers were given longer sentences than if they had been murderers."

"Men are always far more shocked by the vulgarities of women then women are by the vulgarities of men. It is one of the few monopolies which men consider should be theirs after the emancipation of women."

"In each human being there is an emergency exit: that is, the cult of self under a multitude of manifestations, which means that when an obsession becomes too violent, you can escape, vanish with a snicker."

"Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before. - to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918"

"The following evening John left with Lady Shorne for the south of France, without so much as a word to me. Alexa felt as if she were hearing that fateful cliche for the first time. "Without so much as a word." No matter how much she tried to see it from every point of view, its meaning was always clear. John was a coward. Anne was his victim. The roles were the opposite of what she had supposed. It was Anne who had been heroic, not John. John was a coward, a mere puppet into whom both Anne and Alexa had managed to breathe a semblance of life. He was as much the creation of one as of the other."

"Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise."

"You are my lover and I am your mistress and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination."

"The suggestion that the prime minister had been flirting with one of the senior women cabinet ministers made me laugh every time I saw it, and I thought, "if you only knew!" Perhaps they should have pushed it a bit harder."

"Good Christian people who wouldn't dream of misbehaving will not catch AIDS."

"My message to the businessmen of this country when they go abroad on business is that there is only one thing above all they can take with them to stop them catching AIDS - and that is the wife..."

"The Lamb is, indeed, the emblem of love; but what so terrible as the wrath of the Lamb? The depth of the mercy despised is the measure of the punishment of him that despiseth. No more fearful words than those of the Saviour. The threat- enings of the law were temporal, those of the gospel are eternal. It is Christ who reveals the never-dying worm, the unquenchable fire, and He who contrasts with the eternal joys of the redeemed the everlasting woes of the lost. His loving arms would enfold the whole human race, but not while impenitent or unbelieving; the benefits of His redemption are conditional."

"The longer men sin, the more easily they can; for every act of transgression weakens conscience, stupefies intellect, hardens hearts, adds force to bad habits, and takes force from good example. And, surely, there is nothing in such associations; as wicked affinities will insure to the sinner in the future state, to incline him to repentance."

"Give us more and more of real Christianity, and we shall need less of its evidences. Act upon the supposition that Christ is a Divine Teacher, and you will soon have a demonstration of its truth."

"O, to have the soul bathed all day long in this thought, " as the pebble in the willow brook " until the words come like the tears, because the heart is full, and we cannot help it; to feel, in the darkest hour, that there is an unseen Spectator whose eyes rest on us like morning on the flowers; and that in the severest sorrow, we can sink into a presence full of love and sympathy, deeper than ever breathed from earth or sky or loving hearts— a presence in which all fears and anxieties melt away as ice-crystals in the warm ocean. This is heaven."

"In His discourses, His miracles, His parables, His sufferings, His resurrection, He gradually raises the pedestal of His humanity before the world, but under a cover, until the shaft reaches from the grave to the heavens, whenHe lifts the curtain, and displays the figure of a man on a throne, for the worship of the universe; and clothing His church with His own power, He authorizes it to baptize and to preach remission of sins in His own name."

"The enthronement of Christ over the minds of men is steadily going forward. His kingdom embraces the princes in the realm of mind. It embraces the nations of highest civilization. They are all beneath the cross. It is maintained by simple authority. Other mental monarchs rule by logic; Christ's word is law — it is satisfying to His subjects. His truth in the handsof His disciples, like the bread He broke upon the mountains, is an ample supply for the millions that gather at His table."

"Go to Dahomey, Ashantee, Caffraria, Malaisia, — anywhere; search out the rudest people on earth; draw a picture of its vices and cruelties, make it as black as you can, and we will parallel it by pictures of Greece under Pericles and of Rome under Cicero."

"All other great men are valued for their lives; He, above all, for His death, around which mercy and truth, righteousness and peace, God and man are reconciled; for the cross is the magnet which sends the electric current through the telegraph between earth and heaven, and makes both Testaments thrill, through the ages of the past and future, with living, harmonious, and saving truth."

"The world cannot bury Christ. The earth is not deep enough for His tomb, the clouds are not wide enough for His winding-sheet; He ascends into the heavens, but the heavens cannot contain Him. He still lives — in the church which burns unconsumed with His love; in the truth that reflects His image; in the hearts which burn as He talks with them by the way."

"You may be a dreadful failure. Christ is a Divine success. "Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth.""

"Christ's method is divine. His words have the charm of antiquity with the freshness of yesterday; the simplicity of a child with the wisdom of a God; the softness of kisses from the lip of love, and the force of the lightning rending the tower. His parables are like groups of matchless statuary; His prayers like an organ peal floating round the world and down the ages, echoed by the mountain-peaks and plains into rich and varied melody, in which all devout hearts find their noblest feelings at once expressed, sustained, refined. His truths are self-evidencing. They fall into the soul as seed into the ground, to rest and germinate. He speaks, and all nature and life become vocal with theology."

"They take inadequate views of Christ's prophetic character, who think Jesus came only to utter discourses, parables, and prayers. Suppose all He ever said to be found in the writings of Jewish rabbis and heathen philosophers, His great function would still be an orginal one, to show us the Father."