People From London

"People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what."

"I've got one thing to say about being the bass player … I didn't want the role of being Entwhistle or Bill Wyman, stuck in the background. That's too depressing and if that was what I'd been offered with The Clash I would've turned it down. Maybe that's the nature of the job, or has been in the past; the bass player as the one that held the fort, so to speak, along with the drummer, letting every body else go lunatic. But, y'know — why can't we all be lunatics?"

"What made a big difference was the open door policy we had. Anyone who wanted to come backstage could, and it was never a problem. I don't know whether other bands did that. It was good for us to meet people who had come to see the group and converse with them, ask them 'What's it like in your town? What, there are no clubs here? So what do you do?' It was about sharing information and it was good to know what was going on out there, and how people were dealing with their lives. And that spread right across the world."

"At dawn, a railwaywoman On a country platform whirls on the end of a chain An irrelevant key, while a young guard makes to wipe A crumb from her lapel; and see, she smiles A permissory smile you take in from your corner seat: A cameo of unrehearsed perfection."

"Is fine - as long as no one comes And asks us what we do there... We'd have to say, Without our toil, Just who would know it grew there?"

"Following daily such a dread- ful trade to earn a living, With every second on that cliff So cruel and unforgiving,"

"An extended pastoral elegy in prose is what Blunden's Undertones of War (1928) may be called. Whatever it is (G. S. Fraser once called it "the best war poem" and printed some of it as free verse in the London Magazine), no one disagrees that together with Sassoon's and Graves's "memoirs" it is one of the permanent works engendered by memoirs of the war. Its distinction derives in large part from the delicacy with which it deploys the properties of traditional English literary pastoral in the service of the gentlest (though not always the gentlest) kind of irony. If Spenser or Milton or Gray or Collins or Clare or the author of Thyrsis had fought in the Great War, any one of them could have used Blunden's final image to end a memoir of it. With a due sense of theatrical costume and an awareness of a young subaltern's loving responsibility for the flock under his care, Blunden brings Undertones of War to a close by calling himself "a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat" (314). That characterization is English to a fault, and beautiful."

"It [Undertones of War] is beautifully written and rich in literary references. More significantly, it is a lament for the destruction of the French and Belgian countryside, and by implication, the threat to natural peace and beauty everywhere by the savage, impersonal menace of war. As Paul Fussell has perceptively written, for Blunden the countryside was not merely beautiful; it was as magical and as precious to him as English literature: "For it to be brutally torn up by shells is a scandal close to murder". It is essentially in this poignant sense of natural destruction and needless waste (including the loss of animals and old buildings as well as people) that Blunden could be construed as "anti-war". He had little sense of political causation or strategic factors, seeing the conflict rather in terms of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or the effects of a drastic climate change."

"Australia once produced poets who were English poets a little out of touch; now she has her own; and O'Reilly with ball in hand is quite the parallel of an Australian poet, territorially distinct in rhythm, passion, scheme and transition."

"I am for the woods against the world, But are the woods for me?"

"To-day's house makes to-morrow’s road; I knew these heaps of stone When they were walls of grace and might, The country’s honour, art’s delight That over fountain'd silence show'd Fame's final bastion."

"I have been young, and now am not too old; And I have seen the righteous forsaken, His health, his honour and his quality taken. This is not what we were formerly told."

"I saw the sunlit vale, and the pastoral fairy-tale; The sweet and bitter scent of the may drifted by; And never have I seen such a bright bewildering green. But it looked like a lie, Like a kindly meant lie."

"The field and wood, all bone-fed loam, Set up a roaring harvest-home."

"This was my country, and it may be yet, But something flew between me and the sun."

"Cricket to us, like you, was more than play, It was a worship in the summer sun."

"Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan, Use him as though you love him; Court him, elude him, reel and pass, And let him hate you through the glass."

"Then is not Death at watch Within those secret waters? What wants he but to catch Earth’s heedless sons and daughters? With but a crystal parapet Between, he has his engines set."

"The hop-poles stand in cones, The icy pond lurks under, The pole-tops steeple to the thrones Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder; But not the tallest there, ’tis said, Could fathom to this pond’s black bed."

"Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day, I sit in solitude and only hear Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay, The lost intensities of hope and fear; In those old marshes yet the rifles lie, On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags, The very books I read are there—and I Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags Its wounded length from those sad streets of war Into green places here, that were my own; But now what once was mine is mine no more, I seek such neighbours here and I find none. With such strong gentleness and tireless will Those ruined houses seared themselves in me, Passionate I look for their dumb story still, And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree."

"Can she who shines so calm be fear? What poison pours she in slumber's ear?"

"Old farm-houses with their white faces Fly, and their ghosts have taken their places; Even the signposts like grim liars Point to losing brakes and briars."

"Like the bee that now is blown Honey-heavy on my hand, From the toppling tansy-throne In the green tempestuous land,— I’m in clover now, nor know Who made honey long ago."

"Here they went with smock and crook, Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade, Here they mudded out the brook And here their hatchet cleared the glade: Harvest-supper woke their wit, Huntsmen’s moon their wooings lit."

"And nigh this toppling reed, still as the dead The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch, Watching the waterpit shelving and dark Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread.... He on the sandbank lies, Sunning himself long hours With stony gorgon eyes: Westward the hot sun lowers."

"At Quincy's moat the squandering village ends, And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends Of all the village, two old dames that cling As close as any trueloves in the spring."

"I recur here to my personal point about the tendency to miss what the title means; or even what the title says. An article like this is called subjective because it has no subject. In a rambling column, whether because it is personal or impersonal, it is permissible to introduce personal trifles about oneself, as well as about other people, so long as it is made sufficiently obvious that they are trifling. And I may remark in this connexion, or disconnexion, that I happen to have a very strong objection to that trick of missing the point of a story, or sometimes even the obvious sense of the very name of a story. I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book. For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is, merely by discovering what it professes to be. … It is odd that one example occurred in my own case... in a book called The Man Who was Thursday."

"Trent read and re-read the pitiful message [a suicide note], so full of the awful egotism of grief."

"[S]he had a singular spaciousness of mind in which nothing little or mean could live."

"Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew — here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment."

"Is it a cosmic law, d'you think, that conceited men's hats are always too small?"

"You may as well know, Philip — you'll soon find out, anyhow — the truth is she will flirt with any man that she doesn't actively dislike. She's so brimful of life she can't hold herself in — or she won't, rather; she says there's no harm in it, and she doesn't care if there is. Before her marriage she didn't go on in that way, but since it turned out badly she has been simply uncivilized on that point. And her being perfectly clear-headed about it makes it so much worse."

"And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot."

"I know, if anyone does — all research workers know — how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them."

"He was less afraid of gentlemen than of most other kinds of men; for instinct told him that, however detestable a gentleman's personal character might be, he was usually not inclined to be censorious or even inquisitive about the conduct of his fellow-creatures."

"As he went through the half-darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like many another in case like his, was far from grasping fully how bad his luck had been, how little the chance that life had offered. Neglect and harshness had marked him in infancy; there had been nothing at any time to tell against the effect of them. But in all of the past that he remembered and could understand there had been more than enough to be stored up as matter for savage resentment, for the soul-sick criminal's conviction that he owes the world no more than such repayment as he can make in its own coin."

"That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile — that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself."

"There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings."

"Chapman & Hall Swore not at all. Mr Chapman's yea was yea, And Mr Hall's nay was nay."

"George the Third Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder."

"I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism too, unless I misunderstand that system."

"Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime."

"She [Mabel Manderson] uttered a little laugh of impatience. 'So you think he has been talking me round. No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do it. Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are, Mr Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was foolishness in you to have a certain suspicion of me after seeing me and being in my atmosphere, as you said.' Trent started in his chair. She glanced at him and went on: 'Now, I and my atmosphere are much obliged to you, but we must stand up for the rights of other atmospheres. I know a great deal more about Mr Marlowe's atmosphere than you know about mine even now. I saw him constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a poor woman's pocket, Mr Trent.'"

"'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he [Philip Trent] demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character — what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of openwork; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could associate you with the kind of abomination I imagined is a fool — the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.'"

"'Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would carry them through anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed up' — Mr Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture — 'with ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a child of the age.'"

"Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely? When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered under a blow."

"It was a weakness of Voltaire's To forget to say his prayers, And one which to his shame He never overcame."

"Edward the Confessor Slept under the dresser. When that began to pall, He slept in the hall."

"Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium."

"What I like about Clive Is that he is no longer alive. There is a great deal to be said For being dead."