"It seems as if Nature had curiously plann'd That men's names with their trades should agree; There's Twining the Tea-man, who lives in the Strand, Would be whining, if robb'd of his T."

"Cease your humming; The case is "on"; Defendant's Cumming, Plaintiff's—gone!"

"This pair in matrimony Go most unequal snacks: He gets all the Honey, And she gets all the whacks."

"Cease, ye Etonians! and no more With rival wits contend: Feathers, we know, will float in air, And bubbles will ascend."

"Beneath, a sleeping infant lies, To earth whose ashes lent, More glorious shall hereafter rise, Though not more innocent. When the arch-angel's trump shall blow, And souls and bodies join, What crowds will wish, their lives below Had been as short as thine!"

"Among circuitboard crowsteps To be miniaturised is not small-minded. To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells — Your harbours, your photography, your democratic intellect Still boundless, chip of a nation."

"Let sickness blast, and death devour, If heaven must recompense our pains Perish the grass, and fade the flower, If firm the word of God remains."

"An arch wag has declar'd, that he truly can say Why the Prince did not lay the first stone t'other day: The Restrictions prevented — the reason is clear; The Regent can't meddle in making a pier."

"Shelley styles his new poem "Prometheus Unbound," And 'tis like to remain so while time circles round; For surely an age would be spent in the finding A reader so weak as to pay for the binding!"

"When each points out a different way, What mediums shall we keep? The text invites to watch and pray, The priest himself, to sleep."

"When Anacreon would fight, as the poets have said, A reverse he display'd in his vapour, For while all his poems were loaded with lead, His pistols were loaded with paper. For excuses, Anacreon old custom may thank, Such a salvo he should not abuse, For the cartridge, by rule, is always made blank, That is fired away at Reviews."

"Two Miltons in separate ages were born: The cleverer Milton 'tis clear we have got, Though the other had talents the world to adorn, This lives by his mews, which the other could not!"

"Thinking of Helensburgh, J. G. Frazer Revises flayings and human sacrifice; Abo of the Celtic Twilight, St Andrew Lang Posts him a ten-page note on totemism And a coloured fairy book."

"James Murray combs the dialect from his beard And files slips for his massive Dictionary."

"The gaudy minstrel of the morn."

"All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

"I wish my deadly foe, no worse Than want of friends, and empty purse."

"Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot began the hearing of a very curious case yesterday. A Mrs. Tasker is accused of continually ringing the doorbell of a Mrs. Renton, and then, when the door is opened, pushing a dozen red-bearded dwarfs into the hall and leaving them there."

"In the merry month of May, In a morn by break of day, Forth I walk’d by the wood-side Whenas May was in his pride: There I spièd all alone Phillida and Coridon."

"Come little babe, come silly soul, Thy father’s shame, thy mother’s grief, Born as I doubt to all our dole, And to thyself unhappy chief: Sing lullaby, and lap it warm, Poor soul that thinks no creature harm."

"We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb."

"Rush hour: that hour when traffic is almost at a standstill."

"Hush, hush, Nobody cares! Has Fallen Down- Stairs."

"The Doctor is said also to have invented an extraordinary weapon which will make war less brutal. It is described as a very powerful liquid which rots braces at a distance of a mile."

"Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht has patented a new invention. It is an illuminated trouser-clip for bicyclists who are using main roads at night."

"I also attended his eightieth birthday celebration in , in 2003. Peter gave a wonderful polished talk about his experiences at in World War II, which was informative and moving and made a political point. I noticed that he frequently paused to refer to a very small sheaf of notes in his hand. He left the papers on the rostrum after the talk, and out of curiosity I took a look. They were blank! It was a ."

"The man with the false nose had gone to that bourne from which no hollingsworth returns."

"I would have wished that I could write in some detail of the nature of our work in those wonderfully exciting days. For we were regularly reading the highest grade cipher messages passing between the German High Command and a the senior echelons of the German army, the German navy (including the U-boat fleet) and the Luftwaffe; moreover, we were reading those messages within a few hours of their original transmission. We were thus able to provide as perfect and complete picture of the enemy's plans and dispositions as any nation at war has ever had at its disposal — not lightly did Churchill described our work as his "secret weapon," far more potent than anything Werner von Braun could deploy against us. Unfortunately, the British government currently is behaving in a remarkably paranoid fashion with respect to the revelations of "secrets" by those who at some time (as, of course, I had to do) taken an oath of confidentiality."

"One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife's ear."

"Erratum. In my article on the price of milk, 'horses' should have read 'cows' throughout."

"I am very much a generalist as opposed to a specialist. It's rather unfashionable, but I feel someone's got to be one. So every book is a new departure."

"... One scholar says Tolstoy tells us to give away our money; Dostoevsky tells us to go to church; Chekhov says "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do"; Gogol says "To hell with it." But they all deal with a fumbling search for certainties with which we all engage. And they are failures in one sense or another, as we all are."

"... Throughout my writing life, travel has lent a vehicle in which to explore the inner terrain of fears and desires we stumble through every day. Writing about travel allowed flexibility and freedom within a rigid frame of train journeys, weather, and a knackered tent. The creative process is an escape from personality (T. S. Eliot said that), and so is the open road. And a journey goes in fits and starts, like life."

"... The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of , and s are its poster boys."

"The travel writer Sara Wheeler prefers to travel alone. If she didn’t, you’d instantly volunteer to be her travelling companion. She’s an absolute hoot. But also deadly serious, fabulously well-read, thoughtful, self-deprecating – everything you’d want while slowly crossing some vast continent by bus or by train."

"Loyalty is the Tory’s secret weapon."

"That learning belongs not to the female character, and that the female mind is not capable of a degree of improvement equal to that of the other sex, are narrow and unphilosophical prejudices."

"All sensible people agree in thinking that large seminaries of young ladies, though managed with all the vigilance and caution which human abilities can exert, are in danger of great corruption."

"Can anything be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting temptation?"

"The people as a source of sovereign power are in truth only occasional partners in the constitutional minuet danced for most of the time by Parliament and the political party in power."

"A government above the law is a menace to be defeated."

"The turn of the century raises expectations. The end of a millennium promises apocalypse and revelation. But at the close of the twentieth century the golden age seems behind us, not ahead. The end game of the 1990s promises neither nirvana nor Armageddon, but entropy."

"Stand in the trench, Achilles, Flame-capped, and shout for me."

"What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect of the wind. The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (12 knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated."

"I saw a man this morning Who did not wish to die; I ask and cannot answer If otherwise wish I."

"The placid pug that paces in the park."

"Oh Hell of ships and cities, Hell of men like me, Fatal second Helen, Why must I follow thee?"

"Was it so hard, Achilles, So very hard to die? Thou knowest and I know not — So much the happier I."

"I am the Love that dare not speak its name."

"He has been our Master Interpreter; he has toiled year after year that his countrymen might understand what their forebears really thought and did, when they failed, where they succeeded. He has made it possible for us to understand the curious warp or twist in the regular development of this nation that has made it different from other European nations in its political and social life—a warp of a strange, possibly not wholly beneficial, kind, but a warp the conditions of which can now to some extent be made out. He has done for us as to Cromwell's day what Stubbs has done for us as to the days of Henry FitzEmpress and Earl Simon and Edward I, and he has done it by enormous toil, and by a well-devised and consistent method. Knowledge can only be achieved by rightly directed and unselfish effort. Gardiner knew this, and in the security and helpfulness of his results he had the sole reward he sought or valued."