Memoirists From England

"Of course, was an eccentric, and his life story reads like something invented by Edgar Allan Poe with a certain amount of help from Richard Jefferies, but we have always needed the eccentrics to point the way. It was Waterton who warned the Americans, for example, of the ultimate cost of their profligate destruction of their forests. It was Waterton who fought against the beginnings of pollution in the Industrial Revolution. It was he who turned the grounds of into a , even maintaining trees with holes in them in which birds could nest and building a special bank for s."

"In 1812, when he was retreating from the blood and confusion of Moscow and the disastrous , Napoleon had remarked that there was only a single step separating the sublime from the ridiculous. From moment that he was deposited on , until the day when his body was finally removed from the island twenty-five years later, the sublime and the ridiculous were often so closely intertwined that it was impossible to separate the one from the other. The servants and companions who were with him on the island still treated him with all the fear and respect that was owing to an , but the more they bobbed and bowed in Napoleon's presence and tried to maintain the illusion of , the more rigidly they need to shut out any mirror reflection of what they were doing and how they looked while they were doing it."

"War was justified, especially if the foe was weakly armed, and, preferably, coloured. Beautiful women asserted themselves through romantic bitchiness (which left men very stricken or very bored), through espionage, leading to sudden death in exotic circumstances, or through hunting: 'Gad, George, she keeps her seat like a man, damme, she does.'"

"Peter Vansittart, who has died aged 88, was a master of the historical novel and a writer of outstanding talent. He wrote more than 40 books, which also encompassed anthologies, works on literature and . As he was the first to concede, the reading public could be slow to enjoy his novels. He put this down to his “obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others”. Nonetheless, he was admired by critics and fellow authors. To , he was “a master of description”, and to , “a carefully accurate historian [and] a splendidly imaginative writer of fiction”."

"Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the , about the pleasure of food and wine, or — in contrast — about the overstuffed house of a solid Jewish family in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. A short paragraph of hers can expand in the reader's mind into a hinterland of suggestion and sensation. However does she do it? She says in Quicksands that she took a lesson from Ernest Hemingway's remark that "all you have to do is to write one true sentence, and then go on from there"."

"The were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones."

"No writer played less to the gallery. Often shy, she could nevertheless tell marvellously funny stories about Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton or the fastidious Huxleys in India, offered a meal of chocolates, ice cream, dumplings stuffed with curried mice. One remembers a sturdy, trousered figure, bright blue eyes, effective and observant, the clipped voice quickening at an ungenerous remark or deference to some fashionable fraud. Always she treasured "that sense of lighter heart, deep-grooved pleasures, daylight and proportion". Her memoir, Quicksands (2005), revived interest in the writer, and her elegant, insightful work."

"The descendants of the sleeping on the pavements of are paupers. We speak of poverty as being abject, extreme, dire, genteel; crippling, unmitigated, relative. It can be all of these, but it is always the last."

"' ... had been earning its advance, and Aldous was being paid royalties. The book sold 2,500 copies in the first year and 86 the year after. (', Scott Fitzgerald's first novel published the year before, sold forty-five thousand.) Cash in hand, Aldous enrolled Suzanne in an art course he had seen advertised in '."

"By about 1900 BC, successive invaders, notably from Spain, were ousting Stone Age rulers and bringing Britain into the Mediterranean trade orbit. Sophisticated engineers erected , the , the 20,000 s and smaller stone circles signalling to a sky thick with gods."

"' ... tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a . This isn't as strange as it sounds: Macdonald, who became obsessed with as a child, has flown many falcons over the years, and it's who has died so suddenly, a man she associates strongly with her passion (a press photographer, he and his daughter were good companions, sharing a certain beadiness and the ability to be vastly patient). But in another way it's perverse. Goshawks are by reputation the ruffians of , being bloodthirsty, temperamental and supposedly difficult to tame."

"We are pretty much in the right now, we just expect it to take place in 24 hours. Actually, it just takes place in a slightly longer timeframe. It is going to be grim. We are going to have to adapt."

"Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what s and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries."

"s are various creatures and we’ve recruited them to symbolise many things. s are a placeholder for social anxieties: reviled as invading thugs in the , their crime seems little more than failing to treat humans and human spaces with due respect. Other seabirds, like s and s, fall into the anthropomorphised category of cute little guys, mable avian '. And oceanic specialists like s and s spend so much of their lives at sea, visiting their nesting burrows in darkness, they seem barely part of our world at all: the Other rendered in feathers. But in my lifetime, seabirds have symbolised one thing above all: . News photographs of s thickly coated in horrified me when I was young; their gluey silhouettes are still seared into my brain."

"Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All of this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can't be seen except through what anthropologist described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world."

"It’s true, you can go nuts when you suddenly lose someone you love, you fall off the world. I saw in the goshawk — this ferocious, intense, bloodthirsty, murderous creature — what I felt: rage-filled and angry, living in the present with no thought for the future. My mistake was identifying too much with the bird and forgetting how to be a human."

"As the slipped towards spring and cases of began to blossom horribly across the map of Europe, I was in Costa Rica on a wildlife-watching tour. For two weeks I shared a minibus with a group of retired British folk whose main aim was to see as many birds as possible: we met every evening to tick off the species we’d seen that day from a ready-printed list. We saw s, s, s, s, hawks, a whole cavalcade of tiny , s that snapped and buzzed through the air like animated electrons. ... ... I realised that this trip was disquieting me because we weren’t learning anything much about the birds we saw: we were identifying them, ticking them off a list, and moving on, caught up in a hungry and expectant apperception of the world in which the lived reality of the creatures that flew and sang around us seemed almost entirely obscured by the triumphant, costly light of seeing them."

"People say, Why didn’t you get a dog? I guess the big question is, Why didn’t you find a human? In a way, I tried. I fell in love with a friend of mine, a very nice man. I think I freaked him out, deeply, because I was broken. He ran away. So maybe there was a feeling that the hawk was safe. But is very strange in that it’s very much about letting things go. These birds are flown free; once you’ve got them tame and trained, you let them go every day! And hope they come back to you. When they do, that reestablishes the sense that things can return."

"s nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by s; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies. During World War II, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed , reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar, flashing and twirling as it fell. They mate on the wing. And while young martins and s return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers."

"What has always filled me with wonder is the assurance with which many historical linguists assign a date to their reconstructed proto-language. . . . We are told that proto-Indo- European was spoken about 6,000 years ago. What is know with a fair degree of certainty is the time between proto-Indo-Aryan and the modern Inclo-Aryan languages—something in the order of 3,000 years. But how can anyone tell that the development from proto- Indo-European to proto-Indo-Aryan took another 3,000 years? . . . Languages are known to change at different rates. There is no way of knowing how long it took to go from the presumed homogeneity of proto-Indo-European to the linguistic diversity of proto-Indo- Iranian, proto-Celtic, proto-Germanic, etc. The changes could have been rapid or slow. We simply don't know. . . .Why couldn't proto-lndo-European have been spoken about 10,500 years ago? . . . The received opinion of a date of around 6000 BP for proto-Indo- European . . . is an ingrained one. I have found this a difficult matter to get specialists to even discuss. Yet it does seem to be a house of cards. (47-49)"

"We didn't know who she was when we started the series. John Howard Davies cast her and we all liked her, so from then on, we used her for all but the more upper-class roles. We simply liked what she did; she was very easy to get along with, she could be very silly when required and she didn't have an excessive sense of dignity."

"… I had to read [the script for the first episode of Flying Circus] several times in order to try and make some sense of it. The sketches ended strangely or sometimes didn't seem to end at all! Others had an odd beginning too. It certainly wasn't the sort of humour I was used to and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all."

"I was a great Lucille Ball fan. I did actually want to be Lucille Ball. Or Marilyn Monroe. I didn't care which."

"One day, when we were doing a read-through, the boys realised they had forgotten to cast another male to be in a jungle sketch. Rather than make an urgent phone call, Michael suggested that I do it instead. It turned out to be one of my most enjoyable sketches, because it was so silly! I'm dressed exactly as they are, in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, with a huge moustache and speaking in a very low gravelly voice. There was no disguising I'm a female though, as I still have my lipstick and false eyelashes on. After that they often put me in men's roles!"

"Carol … was the unsung heroine because she was so spot on. We never had to tell her how to play a scene, she just had a Python way of thinking about it."

"When [the Pythons] discovered that I had a flair for comedy, the roles got more interesting. Michael … was always the one [to recommend me]; I think if it hadn't been for Michael, I probably always would have just been the glamour stooge."

"According to one of my correspondents, Jessica Mitford was overheard to remark, "I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.""

"O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment."

"However healthy a love one may have of civilization and all its fleshpots, the best thrill of the year is when one leaves them all behind, and sets off for the unknown with a lot of lumpy luggage that contains hardly any clothes at all. It is good to feel that one has left one's little niche in the every­day world, where each one of us is assessed and tabulated to a nicety; to slough off one's everyday accepted self, and to loose oneself in the anonymity of a strange country and people, among whom one has to make good solely by the leverage of one's personality and will to win. The thrill increases till the last vestige of civilization is gone and one is at grips with the unknown, when it comes down to earth, and settles into a hard absorbing fight with primitive conditions; with the problems of health and climate and transport, with the daily struggle for food, water and trans­port, and the groping after understanding of the strange and sometimes antagonistic people one is among. All the complexities of life disappear, and one is reduced to the state, mental and physical, of a healthy animal. As long as one's "tummy" is reasonably full, and there is a prospect of somewhere safe and dry to sleep, one is perfectly, almost stupidly happy. The creature comforts of life no longer matter. For the first few days one misses one's bath most terribly, but in a short time, I am ashamed to say, one doesn't mind if one never had a bath again! Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but in the wilds it comes a long way after food and sleep, or even a good camel."

"Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity."

"Can you imagine being wonderfully over-paid for dressing up and playing games?"

"Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll all work out in the end."

"Isn't it fascinating that probably the only laugh this man will ever get in his life is by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings."

"Graham was getting through two bottles of gin a day, but those were the large ones that you get behind a bar. Pretty colossal. … He never used the word alcoholic, but he knew darned well that he had to clean his act up. As I understand it anyway, Graham already knew he would be playing Brian [in Life of Brian], and had to really stop drinking with that in mind."

"Graham's writing, at its best, … had that enviable quality of giving no evidence of where it came from. He was like that, too, except that we all knew he came from Leicester, though Graham showed not the slightest sign of having come from Leicester. As far as I was concerned, he had come from the moon—an amiable Looney with the gift of conveying enormous reassurance. You always felt it would be all right while Graham was around—whatever "it" was. And then he would be off 'round the bar of the King's House Hotel, Glen-coe, determined to kiss everyone in the bar. Which he did. And got into a fight. And got banned from the bar."

"[A]s I stood after coming off stage in a state of shock, a tall chap waiting in the queue … offered a few words of consolation, and then minutes later I was having coffee with my main writing partner for the next twenty years.My first impression of Graham Chapman was of physical strength. He was slightly shorter than me, but much tougher, in the lean, angular way of a sportsman. He did not surprise me when he said he was a medical student who climbed mountains and played rugby football. He was wearing a rather hairy tweed jacket and heavy brogues, and he soon lit up a pipe. He seemed dead butch, and slightly taciturn."

"Once the decision had been made, once I decided to stop [drinking], it was easy—except for the … three days of unpleasantness, of—well, of having things crawl all over me and hallucinating. … One of the worst things was not being able to remember if I'd slept or not, whether I was dreaming, or whether I was awake. I didn't know."

"The very first day of filming of The Holy Grail, in fact, we were halfway up a mountainside in Glen Coe, and I hadn't gotten my daily dose, and it was seven o'clock in the morning that we left the hotel. The bar wasn't open; I hadn't realised this, and hadn't gotten anything prepared the night before that I should have if I'd researched my drinking properly. And so I had DTs on the mountainside while having to try and remember lines and (uh) stand up. … It was then that I decided next time that I do a job like this I'm going to be clean for it. It's not fair to the other chaps in the group, it's not fair to me, it's not fair to what I've written, and it's very stupid."

"[My parents] came to grips with the drinking … much more easily, I think, than [with my sexuality]. Yes. But, things are rather better now than in those days, of course. It was some time ago. And now, even the Church of England, I think, regards a homosexual as merely being handicapped."

"It's fear. … There's no point in it. We should just love each other, and do it in our own way. That's the only thing that's important."

"I think … [what attracted me to show business] was the early radio shows. I was an avid listener to radio shows like Take It from Here; before that, Jewel and Warriss, Hancock, all sorts of radio shows. And then, later—when I was around thirteen, fourteen—The Goon Show, of course. Here came a show which was not like any of the other shows. It didn't have the same kind of rules. It didn't have any rules. It didn't even like the medium that was putting it out, particularly; it didn't like the BBC. Wonderful! There was something I could relate to, and did."

"There was one occasion when John Cleese and myself actually felt guilty about laughing at something we were writing, because it was in incredibly bad taste. So bad was the taste that we just couldn't help laughing at it. It concerned a gentleman walking into … an undertaker's premises with his dead mother in a sack. And from there it got worse."

"He was the most "extremely" person I think I've ever met. It didn't really matter what the adjective was, because he would be extremely that—whether it was kind or unkind or good or bad or funny or not funny, I mean there was nothing he ever did that he didn't do … much more extremely than anybody else would. … "[S]ubversive authority figures" … sounds rather like a paradox, and it's a very good paradox as far as Graham is concerned; … but, actually, the person he continually subverted was himself. … Because he was always this rather tweedy person on first meeting him, and that was an impression that lasted at least three seconds into any relationship. … But, there was always a sort of danger there, because you never actually knew what was going to happen next."

"Ultimately, I think writing is more … satisfying [than acting], … because if you write something, later on in the day … you can read it through again and you know that it's … good. That's a very satisfying feeling because [the work] is there, it's something you've created. … Acting is … a skill which a lot of people have. Less so with writing …. But, I'm enjoying acting now much more than I did. It was torture for me at one point, in the latter days of [Monty Python's Flying Circus]. But then, after sobering up, I really began to enjoy it again."

"[I]t took about four men to live [Graham Chapman's] life. There was the quiet pipe-smoking tweed-jacketed doctor, who could elucidate complicated medical facts to the layman while calmly diagnosing and dispensing medicines; there was the quiet pipe-smoking writer who could sit all day painting his nails with gestetner fluid, occasionally interjecting the oddest comments, squawks, shouts of 'Betty Marsden' and injunctions to sing 'Only Make-Believe' in a squeaky voice; there was the quiet pipe-smoking homosexual, who could calmly bring a party of Chinese boys down for breakfast in an extremely bourgeois German suburban hotel, causing the manageress conniptions and ending in a request that he move to a more suitable establishment; and there was the quiet pipe-smoking alcoholic, who could reduce any drinks party to a shambles by consuming half a distillery and then crawling round the floor kissing all the men and groping all the women."

"John rings. He’s been away in the country for the weekend. Has just returned to find a message that Graham has had a nervous breakdown."

"Dropped in to see Graham in Southwood Lane. He came out of hospital yesterday and is not supposed to drink ever again. He looked sallow and tense. It’s going to be a great struggle for him. Barry Cryer was there too. We sat and sipped tea and Barry and I joked rather forcibly. It seemed the only thing to do at the time."

"[The other Pythons all lead] boring lives, but Graham lives what we do on the screen for real. … It's constantly surprising, what he does. … Graham was at his best, usually, in very conservative restaurants when we'd be out dining, and there'd be some nice, middle-aged, middle-class couples dining, and you'd suddenly discover Graham was no longer at the table, but was underneath the table, and other people's tables, and kissing people's feet."

"Wander into any pub in the city and strike up a conversation. Offer to buy your companion a drink, order a Guinness and take it from there."

"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."