Novelists From England

"And I had been manipulated, surely, but an actor, of all people, has no business complaining he has been tricked."

"Queen of the silver bow! by thy pale beam, Alone and pensive, I delight to stray, And watch thy shadow trembling in the stream, Or mark the floating clouds that cross thy way. And while I gaze, thy mild and placid light Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast; And oft I think, fair planet of the night, That in thy orb the wretched may have rest; The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go, Released by death, to thy benignant sphere, And the sad children of despair and woe Forget in thee their cup of sorrow here, O that I soon may reach thy world serene, Poor wearied pilgrim in this toiling scene!"

"Oh! for imperial Polydamna’s art, Which to bright Helen was in Egypt taught, To mix with magic power the oblivious draught Of force to staunch the bleeding of the heart, And to Care’s wan and hollow cheek impart The smile of happy youth, uncursed with thought. Potent indeed the charm that could appease Affection’s ceaseless anguish, doomed to weep O’er the cold grave; or yield even transient ease By soothing busy Memory to sleep! —Around me those who surely must have tried Some charm of equal power, I daily see, But still to me Oblivion is denied, There’s no Nepenthe, now, on earth for me."

"Her mouth, which a smile, Devoid of all guile, Half opens to view, Is the bud of the rose In the morning that blows, Impearl’d with the dew.More fragrant her breath Than the flow’r-scented heath At the dawning of day; The hawthorn in bloom, The lily’s perfume, Or the blossoms of may."

"The garlands fade that Spring so lately wove, Each simple flower, which she had nurs’d in dew, Anemonies that spangled every grove, The primrose wan, and hare-bell, mildly blue. No more shall violets linger in the dell, Or purple orchis variegate the plain, Till Spring again shall call forth every bell, And dress with humid hands, her wreaths again. Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair, Are the fond visions of thy early day, Till tyrant passion, and corrosive care, Bid all thy fairy colours fade away! Another May new buds and flowers shall bring; Ah! why has happiness—no second spring?"

"Pressed by the moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines, But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides. The wild blast, rising from the western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed, Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead, And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doomed—by life’s long storm oppressed, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest."

"Who are these from the strange, ineffable places, From the Topaze Mountain and Desert of Doubt, With the glow of the Yemen full on their faces, And a breath from the spices of Hadramaut?Travel-apprentices, travel-indenturers, Young men, old men, black hair, white, Names to conjure with, wild adventurers, From the noonday furnace and purple night.Burckhardt, Halévy, Niebuhr, Slater, Seventeenth, eighteenth-century bays, Seetzen, Sadleir, Struys, and later Down to the long Victorian days.A thousand miles at the back of Aden, There they had time to think of things; In the outer silence and burnt air laden With the shadow of death and a vulture’s wings.There they remembered the last house in Samna, Last of the plane-trees, last shepherd and flock, Prayed for the heavens to rain down manna, Prayed for a Moses to strike the rock.Famine and fever flagged their forces Till they died in a dream of ice and fruit, In the long-forgotten watercourses By the edge of Queen Zobëide’s route.They have left the hope of the green oases, The fear of the bleaching bones and the pest, They have found the more ineffable places— Allah has given them rest."

"Westray looked up and saw the great window at the end of the transept shimmering with a dull lustre; light only in comparison with the shadows that were falling inside the church. It was an insertion of Perpendicular date, reaching from wall to wall, and almost from floor to roof. Its vast breadth, parcelled out into eleven lights, and the infinite division of the stonework in the head, impressed the imagination; while mullions and tracery stood out in such inky contrast against the daylight yet lingering outside, that the architect read the scheme of subarcuation and the tracery as easily as if he had been studying a plan. Sundown had brought no gleam to lift the pall of the dying day, but the monotonous grey of the sky was still sufficiently light to enable a practised eye to make out that the head of the window was filled with a broken medley of ancient glass, where translucent blues and yellows and reds mingled like the harmony of an old patchwork quilt. Of the lower divisions of the window, those at the sides had no colour to clothe their nakedness, and remained in ghostly whiteness; but the three middle lights were filled with strong browns and purples of the seventeenth century. Here and there in the rich colour were introduced medallions, representing apparently scriptural scenes, and at the top of each light, under the cusping, was a coat of arms. The head of the middle division formed the centre of the whole scheme, and seemed to represent a shield of silver-white crossed by waving sea-green bars. Westray’s attention was attracted by the unusual colouring, and by the transparency of the glass, which shone as with some innate radiance where all was dim. He turned almost unconsciously to ask whose arms were thus represented, but the Rector had left him for a minute, and he heard an irritating “Ha, ha, ha!” at some distance down the nave, that convinced him that the story of Sir George Farquhar and the postponed fees was being retold in the dusk to a new victim.Someone, however, had evidently read the architect’s thoughts, for a sharp voice said:“That is the coat of the Blandamers—barry nebuly of six, argent and vert.” It was the organist who stood near him in the deepening shadows. “I forgot that such jargon probably conveys no meaning to you, and, indeed, I know no heraldry myself excepting only this one coat of arms, and sometimes wish,” he said with a sigh, “that I knew nothing of that either. There have been queer tales told of that shield, and maybe there are queerer yet to be told. It has been stamped for good or evil on this church, and on this town, for centuries, and every tavern loafer will talk to you about the ‘nebuly coat’ as if it was a thing he wore. You will be familiar enough with it before you have been a week at Cullerne.”There was in the voice something of melancholy, and an earnestness that the occasion scarcely warranted. It produced a curious effect on Westray, and led him to look closely at the organist; but it was too dark to read any emotion in his companion’s face, and at this moment the Rector rejoined them.“Eh, what? Ah, yes; the nebuly coat. Nebuly, you know, from the Latin nebulum, nebulus I should say, a cloud, referring to the wavy outline of the bars, which are supposed to represent cumulus clouds. Well, well, it is too dark to pursue our studies further this evening, but to-morrow I can accompany you the whole day, and shall be able to tell you much that will interest you.”"

"He might have spoken to a deaf man for all he moved his judge; and Elzevir's answer was to cock the pistol and prime the powder in the pan."

"We have done with dogma and divinity, Easter and Whitsun past, The long, long Sundays after Trinity, Are with us at last; The passionless Sundays after Trinity, Neither feast-day nor fast.Christmas comes with plenty, Lent spreads out its pall, But these are five and twenty, The longest Sundays of all; The placid Sundays after Trinity, Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.Spring with its burst is over, Summer has had its day, The scented grasses and clover Are cut, and dried into hay; The singing-birds are silent, And the swallows flown away.Post pugnam pausa fiet; Lord, we have made our choice; In the stillness of autumn quiet, We have heard the still, small voice. We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom? Thick paper, folio, Boyce.Let it not all be sadness, Not omnia vanitas, Stir up a little gladness To lighten the Tibi cras; Send us that little summer, That comes with Martinmas.When still the cloudlet dapples The windless cobalt blue, And the scent of gathered apples Fills all the store-rooms through, The gossamer silvers the bramble, The lawns are gemmed with dew.An end of tombstone Latinity, Stir up sober mirth, Twenty-fifth after Trinity, Kneel with the listening earth, Behind the Advent trumpets They are singing Emmanuel’s birth."

"In the days of Caesar Augustus There went forth this decree: Si quid rectus et justus Liveth in Galilee, Let him go up to Jerusalem And pay his scot to me.There are passed one after the other Christmases fifty-three, Since I sat here with my mother And heard the great decree: How they went up to Jerusalem Out of Galilee.They have passed one after the other; Father and mother died, Brother and sister and brother Taken and sanctified. I am left alone in the sitting, With none to sit beside.On the fly-leaves of these old prayer-books The childish writings fade, Which show that once they were their books In the days when prayer was made For other kings and princesses, William and Adelaide.The pillars are twisted with holly, And the font is wreathed with yew, Christ forgive me for folly, Youth’s lapses—not a few, For the hardness of my middle life, For age’s fretful view.Cotton-wool letters on scarlet, All the ancient lore, Tell how the chieftains starlit To Bethlehem came to adore; To hail Him King in the manger, Wonderful, Counsellor.The bells ring out in the steeple The gladness of erstwhile, And the children of other people Are walking up the aisle; They brush my elbow in passing, Some turn to give me a smile.Is the almond-blossom bitter? Is the grasshopper heavy to bear? Christ make me happier, fitter To go to my own over there: Jerusalem the Golden, What bliss beyond compare!My Lord, where I have offended Do Thou forgive it me. That so when, all being ended, I hear Thy last decree, I may go up to Jerusalem Out of Galilee."

"Ratsey raised his glass almost before it was filled. He sniffed the liquor and smacked his lips. 'O rare milk of Ararat!' he said, 'it is sweet and strong, and sets the heart at ease. And now get the backgammon-board, John, and set it for us on the table.' So they fell to the game, and I took a sly sip at the liquor, but nearly choked myself, not being used to strong waters, and finding it heady and burning in the throat. Neither man spoke, and there was no sound except the constant rattle of the dice, and the rubbing of the pieces being moved across the board. Now and then one of the players stopped to light his pipe, and at the end of a game they scored their totals on the table with a bit of chalk. So I watched them for an hour, knowing the game myself, and being interested at seeing Elzevir's backgammon-board, which I had heard talked of before.It had formed part of the furniture of the Why Not? for generations of landlords, and served perhaps to pass time for of the Civil Wars. All was of oak, black and polished, board, dice-boxes, and men, but round the edge ran a Latin inscription inlaid in light wood, which I read on that first evening, but did not understand till Mr. Glennie translated it to me. I had cause to remember it afterwards, so I shall set it down here in Latin for those who know that tongue, Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima jactura arte corrigenda est, and in English as Mr. Glennie translated it, As in life, so in a game of hazard, skill will make something of the worst of throws. At last Elzevir looked up and spoke to me, not unkindly, 'Lad, it is time for you to go home; men say that walks on the first nights of winter, and some have met him face to face betwixt this house and yours.' I saw he wanted to be rid of me, so bade them both good night, and was off home, running all the way thither, though not from any fear of Blackbeard, for Ratsey had often told me that there was no chance of meeting him unless one passed the churchyard by night."

"It makes you think of the old days. We all knew these fellows, didn't we? This is so real."

"Some plays drift into neglect from sheer familiarity. The success of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End in 1929 still casts its long shadow: everyone has heard of the piece, and probably caught up with it on radio. And it is invariably used as a reference point for subsequent British war plays."

"He did not write the play with the commercial management in mind. He did not write it with a view to peace propaganda; nor did he write for any glorification of war. He wrote it to satisfy himself alone. He wanted to place on record a simple story of war before the memory died. He did not write it with the possibility of an audience in mind, and when one wrote in that way it was easy to tell the truth as one saw it with one's own eyes. One well-known gentleman said it was false; another described it as crude to the last detail; while another writer in a Scandinavian paper said it was the best play Sheridan had written since the War. (Laughter.) He felt that some of his critics had looked from an angle instead of straight from the front. He sincerely resented any statement that it was a disparagement to the soldier to say that the War broke men's nerve. It was the fighting man he had striven to reverence and remember."

"The King had honoured his play [Journey's End] that night by being present at the Prince of Wales Theatre. In handing over the manuscript of the play he hoped that it might benefit the great cause to which he gave it."

"You will never sense the theatre. This is not "acting" but reality. The hand of God presses itself firmly on your shoulder. You realise how truly noble, in spite of all its shortcomings, is this lump of clay called "man." Your soul will be full of gratitude that such men existed, and that they were Englishmen—that the inherited nobility of the race survived at such a moment. These men bring the war back to us."

"[The anonymous (male) interviewer recently read Lace with pleasure] Oh really? My ex-husband paid his lawyer to read it, to check whether there was anything to sue me about. A lovely job for £250 an hour. ["Did he find anything?"] Well Terence didn’t sue me [...] But I don’t think his lawyer did a very good job."

"[On being motivated to leave the marriage] I went to St Paul's [the independent school in west London]. That was very important. The mistresses were all unmarried – their fiancees had all died on the Somme – and they were quietly subversive. Paulinas are known for having their own views. It would be very difficult for a Paulina not to expect equality in marriage. So when you get married, and find it's not so, it's a shock."

"[On turning down a fourth marriage at the age of 80] He might want to watch football on a Saturday afternoon. I might not be able to eat baked beans in bed at 3am if I want to."

"In the early part of the century, audiences possibly listened more than they do today. In Journey's End the verbal construction of the play is very specific, as it is in this play What Every Woman Knows]. I found that if one hadn't committed oneself at the very beginning to the style as laid down by Sherriff, one would reach an emotional hiatus. The style is similar to Barrie's in its literateness. Playing Stanhope was one of the most uplifting things in my career. The Boys' Own part of me could identify with him, and his first entrance was almost the peak of the part. For 15 minutes they've all been talking about Stanhope so in that first moment one had to present that caring about the front line the clinical awareness of the dangers of laziness, of guns being rusty and things like that. It was emotionally and intellectually exhausting to build to that pitch of mania each night, but it did give one's spine a tingle to be able to indulge all the better parts of oneself, to think that one's being a hero."

"[On her marriage to (Sir) Terence Conran in 1955] It was just criticise, criticise, criticise, from morning to night. It was very wearing. I said at one point, "What I don’t understand is why you want me to stay." He had a good think and then said, "Because you are a very valuable business asset, because you make me laugh and because I got used to you, like my old school rug." What I wanted him to say, of course, was, "I love you." So I walked out."

"Fifty Shades of Grey is so infantile [...] More like baby porn. You have to wait until page 200 for any sex at all. She doesn’t get her bottom spanked until page 400. The writing is jerky: it needed a good edit."

"Canongate have been wonderful. They've allowed me to write the word 'masturbation' back into the copy. When Lace was first published, Michael Korda [the publishing giant who was Conran's editor] said the world wasn't ready for it. We had to use a polite euphemism. But now we have the verb."

"I came back from a visit to my mother in Canada to find a note on the mantelpiece from Kevin [O'Sullivan]. It said: "By the time you read this I will be in Moscow. My wedding ring is in the waste-paper basket where it belongs." Kevin didn't divorce me, he deserted me. We divorced by mutual consent."

"Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom."

"[On her dislike of Christmas cards: M]y self-esteem isn't based on how many shepherds and robins I've got perched on the sideboard."

"[On her divorce from (Sir) Terence Conran in 1962] I was 30. My mother said, "Well, perhaps it's as well your father's dead because otherwise you couldn't have got divorced." I gave her an astounded look, but that's how it was then."

"Journey's End came at psychologically the right moment. The war had been over for 10 years. What plays there had been about it had tended to be heroic and romanticised – the reality was too near and horrific for close contemplation. Journey's End, set in a dug-out in the front line just before a German offensive, was a simple statement of how men lived after four long years of war... They wait in their dug-out, enduring lice, the stench of earth, ordure, corpses and cordite, knowing but never admitting that their chances of survival are minimal. They talk of insensitive generals but never of the political stupidity that led them to be there. They regard the Germans in their dug-outs on the other side of the barbed wire of No-Man's-Land as being as unfortunate as themselves. They yearn for the sight of the New Forest and the Sussex Downs. To that 1929 audience they must have seemed the incarnation of the lost generation."

"In his play Mr. Sherriff had given the world a great thought, a great message, and, she believed, the profound hope that some day by the exposition of the facts there would be abolished the evil institution of war. (Cheers.) ... Mr. Sherriff had taught them what moral and spiritual degradation could come from international warfare. She would like him in his next play to reveal all the horror of that industrial warfare which condemned in times of peace more than a million men in this country to tramp the streets vainly looking for work."

"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty."

"“Not all death warrants are signed by judges or governors,” I explained. “This one was a prenup agreement.”"

"I went to open the front passenger’s door. It was locked and she indicated the rear seat. Apparently it was okay for a Muslim woman to lead a man to his death but not to share the front seat with him."

"DNA doesn’t lie."

"“Twenty-five years ago he was executed.” It shocked me. “Executed?” I said. “For what?” The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. “The usual—corruption on earth.” “I’m sorry, but what exactly does ‘corruption on earth’ mean?” He laughed. “Pretty much whatever we want.” Nearly all of his team found it funny too. “In this case,” he continued, “it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal.”"

"Like the old virologist had said—sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences."

"I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders."

"The old Nobel Laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery anymore. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades and a great deal of the nation’s safety disappeared with them."

"Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence."

"I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. As somebody once said, there was only one thing to recommend it—say you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick."

"We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute."

"The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used."

"“A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it’s always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor. “He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned. “He laughed. ‘Nothing you call original,’ he said. Death’s terrible, suffering’s worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire. “Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them.” Whisperer turned and looked at me. “So that’s what you meant, huh? You’ve been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?” “Yes,” I replied. “I’ve heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They’ve been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I’ve been listening to them.” “And you don’t think we have—the people in Washington?” He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know. “Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut.”"

"I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold."

"“Then what happened?” I asked. “The Russian stopped calling, more important, the bills weren’t paid—I guess he either went broke or another oligarch had him killed.” Probably the latter, I thought. That was the way most business disputes were settled in Russia."

"I mean, there’s no better alibi than being dead, is there?"

"Several guards and retainers exchanged a glance—Gaza was not somewhere to be taken lightly; it was probably the only place in the world that made Afghanistan look safe."

"The Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip—the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims but they were also men. Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly, and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man—a less religious and a more humane man—might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen—the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God."

"By this stage I had switched my patronage to AA—as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings and I had decided that if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained."

"If only—but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good."