Memoirists From The United Kingdom

"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales ... He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womanizer — this I had always known about him ... He was also, interestingly enough, very much a sort of a disappointed writer ..."

"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute."

"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."

"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that the communicants got watered-down from Boots the chemist in , over the border."

"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , excuses for getting out of the (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. ... He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable."

"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life."

"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist. Lessing's initial creative roots lie in this ..."

"that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before Christianity awoke them to the consciousness of sin, of suffering, and of immortality."

"The political activities of Henry Asquith's daughter, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, are of course well-known. Her father—old, supplanted in power, his Party broken up, his authority flouted, even his long-faithful constituency estranged—found in his daughter a champion redoubtable even in the first rank of Party orators. The Liberal masses in the weakness and disarray of the Coalition period saw with enthusiasm a gleaming figure, capable of dealing with the gravest questions and the largest issues with passion, eloquence and mordant wit. In the two or three years when her father's need required it, she displayed force and talent equalled by no woman in British politics. One wildfire sentence from a speech in 1922 will suffice. Lloyd George's Government, accused of disturbing and warlike tendencies, had fallen. Bonar Law appealed for a mandate of ‘Tranquillity.’ "We have to choose," said the young lady to an immense audience, "between one man suffering from St. Vitus's Dance and another from Sleeping Sickness." It must have been the greatest of human joys for Henry Asquith in his dusk to find this wonderful being he had called into the world, armed, vigilant and active at his side. His children are his best memorial, and their lives recount and revive his qualities."

"The recognition of the sanctity of treaties is surely the most vital of all British interests. But in signing the Covenant we pledged ourselves to do more than defend British interests. We undertook to uphold a common law of honour and good faith among nations. It is true that some signatories have since left the League, but in spite of their defection we have remained, and our obligations, backed by our signed word, remain with us... I believe that war can be prevented now if every nation still within the League is prepared to carry out its obligations. War is inevitable sooner or later if this cold-blooded experiment in international anarchy is successfully carried through before a watching world. It is an example which some will not be slow to follow, and Europe may be their playground instead of Africa."

"I am one of millions who watching the martyrdom of Hungary and listening yesterday to the transmission of her agonized appeals for help (immediately followed by the description of our "successful bombing" of Egyptian "targets") have felt a humiliation, shame, and anger which are beyond expression. At a moment when our moral authority and leadership are most direly needed to meet this brutal assault on freedom we find ourselves bereft of both by our own Government's action. For the first time in our history our country has been reduced to moral impotence. We cannot order Soviet Russia to obey the edict of the United Nations which we ourselves have defied, nor to withdraw her tanks and guns from Hungary while we are bombing and invading Egypt. To-day we are standing in the dock with Russia. Like us she claims to be conducting a "police action." We have coined a phrase which has already become part of the currency of aggression. Never in my life-time has our name stood so low in the eyes of the world. Never have we stood so ingloriously alone. Our proud tradition has been tragically tarnished. We can restore it only by repudiating as a nation that which has been done in our name but without our consent—by changing our Government or its leadership."

"We meet in a very dark hour. The events of the last 3 weeks have shattered what remained of that new world-order which some of us have hoped & worked & striven to build for 20 years. They have done more. They have broken a great & honourable tradition of English foreign policy to which this country has adhered through changing Governments & changing parties for centuries. The keystone of that policy has been the refusal to truckle to the strong at the expense of the weak. We have consistently thrown the whole weight of our power behind justice for the weak – against the domination of any single power. This policy which the smaller states of Europe have owed their freedom & their existence has been renounced to-day. When the Prime Minister signed the Munich Agreement he renounced for us all claims to moral leadership. We ceased to be the trustee of a standard of justice & decency in international relationships. We made our formal submission to the rule of Force – & that rule with the acquiescence & sanction of our Government is the only rule that runs in Europe to-day. All this is hailed as a triumph by its supporters. I do not believe that any Peace worthy of the name can be built upon an act of flagrant injustice backed by Force."

"After the war I was one of those who thought, who hoped, who believed that Force had had its day, that Armies and Navies and Air Forces would dwindle away and disappear – discarded like broken toys that men had outgrown. But to-day – look at the world. To-day we see a world which has put back the clock, a world which is reeling backwards away from law, away from freedom, back to the triumph of the aggression of Italy – and the agony of its victim. In that struggle the public opinion of the whole civilized world was solidly ranged against the aggressor. What was the use? Public opinion proved powerless against poison gas. And I think the lessons we have learned from these defeats of law is that it is no good passing judgement unless you are ready to enforce it. It is no good giving a great moral lead if it is to be followed by a rapid physical scuttle. Justice cannot rule this world armed with the scales alone – in her other hand she must hold a sword. Unless we, the free democracies of the world, who are still loyal members of the League, are prepared to stand together and to take the same risks for Justice, Peace and Freedom as others are prepared to take for the fruits of aggression – then our cause is lost – and the Gangsters will inherit the earth."

"'I didn't find it in the least difficult,' said Grigg. 'Those meant to succeed at a thing never do find the thing difficult.' 'Meant? Meant by whom?' 'By the life of which they are a part, whether they know it or not.' 'It is very mystical,' said Grigg."

"She was almost glowing with resolution. She realized that to display moral qualities demands practice, just as much as intellectual and manual qualities."

"She had rather looked down on such shops and on such clothes, but that had been ignorance and the wrong kind of sophistication."

"Upon the passage to truth, cross-currents are to be expected."

"I don’t spend all day reading the newspapers. It can get hold of you as poisonously as the television, if you once let it."

"It was, in any case, quite useless, and, like most useless things, useless almost immediately."

"The idea came to him, not for the first time, that most of the things which people buy in the belief that they are luxuries are really poor substitutes for luxury."

"If a Brexiteer majority still wishes to persist in leaving, once we have made some progress and it’s obvious we’re getting there, you can invoke Article 50 again and leave fairly rapidly. To me, that seems the only rational way in which we can precede. But common sense has gone out of the window."

"[On Margaret Thatcher] She was a bizarre character. She was one of the most unlikely human beings I ever met. If you'd told me that this woman would become Prime Minister, I mean no dislike of her at all, I'd have thought that was ridiculous."

"I wouldn't reject it if it was the only way forward."

"No one has officially told me that I have lost the Tory whip. The fault’s probably mine. I’m notorious for only using my mobile phone for outgoing calls: nobody knows my London number and I certainly don’t do anything online. So there may somewhere be an email or text message or something telling me, but I gather from the media that there’s no doubt that I’ve lost the whip. My status otherwise is completely unclear."

"At the moment I save the House of Commons from having Dennis Skinner as father of the house by 25 minutes"

"If the Conservative Party cannot think of anything else to do it has a leadership contest."

"I don’t want the new leader to make me parliamentary under-secretary for nuts and bolts."

"The referendum is not binding."

"I don't think the Conservative Party could win an election in 1,000 years on this ultra right-wing programme."

"All political careers are a rollercoaster."

"When we negotiate trade agreements in the future, we will be pressing other countries to open up their public procurement processes to genuine, fair, international competition. It would be totally ridiculous to abandon that principle now to give into not only constituency pressures, which I understand, but otherwise nationalist nonsense that ought to be ignored."

"We are all in agreement about the principles of the national health service ...it should be provided free at the point of treatment, according to clinical need and largely funded out of taxation."

"In the end, however, the success of a rebellion depends on the crossing of a fear barrier by enough people, not simply the small group of dedicated dissidents. A judgment that the risk is worth it and the rebellion might actually succeed. [...] It is at this point, when fear is gone, that whole nations say no. And it is when tyrants fall."

"At its simplest, "coup-proofing" is the way in which regimes consolidate a small mafia-like inner core made up of cronies, family, tribal or ethnic interest while using incentives to encourage the security forces, both military and police, to protect the regime while monitoring each other. The unintended consequence of this, however, is paranoid, inward-looking and detached regimes often isolated from the reality of what their people think, reinforced in their own view of their invulnerability and importance by a cadre of yes-men. This, perhaps, explains why dictatorial regimes, regarded as stable and invulnerable by outside observers can collapse as quickly as they can, not least when a key element like the military - as happened in Egypt and Tunisia - removed its support."

"The growing confrontation in the Gulf between the US and its Saudi-led allies on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other is now focused on the spate of recent mine attacks on oil tankers, which have been blamed by the US on . This is a standoff that has been coming. It is incontestable that Iran has been guilty of destabilising overreach in the Middle East in recent years, as it has moved to build a crescent of Shia influence from Damascus to Baghdad and Lebanon to Yemen. But Iran’s actions can hardly be said to have occurred in a vacuum. [...] In tandem with the US moves, Saudi Arabia – one of the countries seen as pushing US policy – has increased its oil production to sell to former buyers of Iranian oil, while at the same time vocally supporting moves to strangle . It is not hard, then, to see how these moves might be viewed in Tehran: as part of an escalating offensive from multiple sources threatening its own home front in a campaign of designed to weaken the regime. The , John Bolton, has been an advocate of regime change in Iran in the past. [...] All of which suggests that far from being the work of an irrational actor on the world stage, the recent attacks on the oil tankers are entirely explicable: a calculated demonstration of the vulnerability of the flow of oil to the world’s biggest economies, including to the EU, India and China. So should the attacks be interpreted as a sign of Iran’s desperation, or as evidence that Tehran has internalised the idea that it is dealing with a weak US administration with little international support for its policies in the Gulf, and is gaming its response accordingly? If the answer is the latter, then that is a judgment which has been encouraged by the wildly inconsistent messaging from Trump himself. The US president has appeared to threaten conflict and then just as quickly rule it out. The tanker attacks – if proved to be the work of Iran – are serious. But they would not represent the most potent move available to Tehran in this standoff. That remains the prospect of the country restarting uranium enrichment beyond the limits agreed in the JCPOA, a move it has already threatened, and which would inevitably trigger an in which the US would be only one actor and Europe would inevitably become embroiled. Clues as to where the crisis goes from here might be found in asking who has most to lose. For Iran’s leadership, for which the survival of the clerical regime is an existential priority that looms above all others, capitulation on US-Saudi terms would not appear to be an option. The depth of the US stake in this increasingly dangerous game is far harder to judge, given the usual confusion of Trump’s flip-flopping and the machinations of Bolton, who may be freelancing his own agenda. All of which leaves us to contemplate the most frightening element of all in a complex crisis: that the current occupant of the White House lacks any of the skills required to successfully defuse it."

"is not remembered much outside Romania these days. Now 58 and the bishop of , in March 1989 he was a parish priest in Timosoara facing eviction from his church apartment. His crime was to have preached against the policy of "systemisation" - the restructuring of his country's towns and villages ordered by the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Ethnically Hungarian, Tökés had a long history of criticising the regime and so when he refused to quit his home, it became a cause célèbre and drew the attention of Ceausescu's secret police, the notorious Securitate. By December 1989, it was not only his parishioners who were standing guard to protect his flat, linking hands around the property, but ethnic Romanians who swelled into a crowd that filled the surrounding streets. What followed over the next few days is better known than Tökés 's personal tale: the mass protests in Timosoara which led, in quick order, to the fall of the once-mighty Ceausescu regime. If this story of one man and his country sounds familiar, that is perhaps because it is."

"A large part of the problem of understanding how modern rebellions come about is the reporting of them. Euphoric moments are condensed to slogans on one hand and on the other into vivid narratives of the crimes of the fallen regime. What falls through the cracks is the process by which the actions of an often small dissident circle are translated into a mass movement involving a sufficient cross-section of society to sweep away a tyrant. If that clouds our understanding, so too does the tendency to limit our examination of rebellions to the facts of the revolutionary moment itself. Instead, what we should be doing is examining why populations ever accept dictatorships. In doing so, we may comprehend more about why they are then rejected, often so suddenly."

"I began this race believing I should be a truth-teller on principle - ironically I have discovered that it is very popular - and the only way to avoid an election and win the next one is by being straight with people. No more unicorns, no more red lines, no more promises we can't deliver. That's how we get Brexit done, defeat Corbyn and unify the country."

"Rory Stewart: One of the advantages of this deal, to be honest, and the reason why 80% of the British public support this deal, is because what it does... Emma Barnett (Interviewer): 80% of the British public support this deal? The draft deal? How on earth do we know that yet? Rory Stewart: OK, let me back on that, my sense is, sorry, let me get the language right on that. My sense is that if we have an opportunity to explain this the vast majority of the British public would support this. Emma Barnett: Where did 80% come from, I'm a bit confused. Rory Stewart: I'm producing a number to try to illustrate what I believe."

"Before I was born, my father was priest, And built to Christ Jesus, a house for the least, To worship Jehovah, the True Living God, Who gave us His favour, and Shed forth His Blood.The Fountain is open, for you and for me, That word it is spoken, and always will be, While sinners are living, in flesh on this earth, And Jesus is praying, and giving them birth."

"As I am not a member of any community, no society can answer for my irregular conduct; neither do I wish to apologize to the world for my procedure; as I believe the Lord is my Shepherd, and Bishop of my soul. Duty to my Maker, excites me to faithfulness, knowing that life is the time to work for God; that I may be counted worthy to reign with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in "the city of the Living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem.""

"In Christ you will find, a very dear Friend; Who is of this mind, to love to the end; Yet satan is seeking, His sheep to devour; And God He is making some whole this bright hour."

"Whoever can feel, the love I do tell, Would take by the heel, poor sinners from hell; As downward they're going, to bring them above; To sing of Christ's dying, a Heaven of love."

"In this city I must visit the abodes of sorrow: but as yet no way has opened: no person offered to go along with me, which has made me determine to do nothing but what connot be avoided of a public nature. O that my little labour of love were finished, and comfortably completed to the joy of such who might hail me a welcome stranger on Zion's happy Coast, where my mansion of bliss awaits me, after all the storms of life are past."

"Perhaps the most extraordinary woman in the world. We need say no more than the truth about her …"

"Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been trying to clarify in myself and which one way or another existed in everyone. The corpse-eater was still in fantasy feeding on the parents. We discussed these ideas and decided to eat no more meat, no more animal products of any kind (such as milk, cheese, eggs) and to discard mineral salt. Apart from a few extreme applications of our position, when I tried to eat such nauseous things as raw potatoes, we found that we felt very much better in health."

"I have never eaten a boiled egg, but I have had a soldier or two."

"Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it."

"Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light."

"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."