"It is the profusion of detail, and the rush of his anecdotal style that make his book both remarkable and engaging. We may perhaps learn from him how, in postmodernist manner, we may treat landscape as a text, with an impersonal author, history itself. "The sum of our pasts", he writes, "generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.""

"Of historic method, indeed, nothing wiser has ever been said than a word which will be found in Gibbon's youthful Essay on the Study of Literature. Facts, the young sage instructs us, are of three kinds: those which prove nothing beyond themselves, those which serve to illustrate a character or explain a motive, and those which dominate the system and move its springs."

"A flight of perplexed unstable minds into the Confessional, into Spiritualism, into strange Eastern Cults."

"A historian should "go on reading (...) until you can hear people talking. Then you will understand why things happened as they did.""

"To play King Richard to somebody else's Wat Tyler has always been a Tory fancy."

"To attend a place of worship, to abstain from spirits, to read a serious newspaper and put money in the savings bank, was in 1840 as good an ideal as could be set before a man. To pursue it gave him rank as a citizen, the promise of a vote, and a share in a solid civilization."

"It was one of Lord Salisbury's paradoxes that only uncontentious legislation should be brought before Parliament: if it were contentious, then public opinion was not ripe for it."

"The human mind is still something of a troglodyte. Expelled from one falling cavern, its first thought is to find another."

"Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact."

"If only Saki – the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro – were still alive. The age of Trump needs his brutal dismantling of human stupidities. Despite a coterie of literary fans, Saki’s icy, perfectly constructed short stories have been relatively little read over the past 50 years – years of smug belief in endless progress — but his tales, by turns malevolent and macabre, may be due a revival in our new age of exigency. … He was a glorious pyromaniac let loose in the genteel upper-middle-class Edwardian world he knew so well. In many of his stories, stuffy authority figures are set against forces of nature – polecats, hyenas, tigers. Even if they are not eaten, the humans rarely have the best of it."

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation."

"The animal which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathematised as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics — courage and self-respect. No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore. Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under the adverse conditions of civilisation — that civilisation which can impel a man to the degradation of clothing himself in tawdry ribald garments and capering mountebank dances in the streets for the earning of the few coins that keep him on the respectable, or non-criminal, side of society. The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside."

"To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments."

"The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them."

"Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent."

"Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."

"Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage."

"A beautifully constructed borsch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought."

"Romance at short notice was her speciality."

"I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient, but it seems I asked too much of fate."

"His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect."

"Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte."

"Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then."

"By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine."

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

"Sredni Vashtar went forth, His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white. His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful."

"The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally."

"Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own."

"You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood."

"All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do both."

"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," [Clovis] resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster."

"You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

"Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up."

"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school."

"The death of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts."

"The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistress."

"Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason than that he didn't get one in December."

"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II."

"I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got."

"People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes."

"It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score."

"Women and elephants never forget an injury."

"The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went."

"Madame was not best pleased at being contradicted on a professional matter, and when Madame lost her temper you usually found it afterwards in the bill."

"Children are given us to discourage our better emotions."

"The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time."

"Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people."

"And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn – I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night."

"I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly."

"I always say beauty is only sin deep."