The Various Flavours Of Coffee

I would never have to take employment again. I could travel: I had always wanted to do the Grand Tour, like so many poets and artists before me. I could afford a place in town, and somewhere quiet in the country. I would be able to write, freed from domestic worries.

the Arabs - they’re the fascinating ones: you never know where you are with them. Their judgement is always being clouded by something: religion, or vanity, or pride.’

They talked of rousing all London, but never seemed to have enough postage stamps.

Brewer was a politician: he had known the best way to make his appeal to me.

How easy it was to confuse attention with affection!

he was a type of man for whom love was indistinguishable from his own interests.

We celebrated the artificial above the natural, the artistic above the practical, and, Oscar Wilde notwithstanding, laid claim to extravagant vices which few of us had any intention of actually indulging.

They knew that the real prize was to get me to pay for love.

Give a heathen charity and he remains a heathen, and the charity is soon gone; but only give him a contract of employment and you have pointed him on the road towards eternal life -’

each tenement is a rookery containing up to a hundred families, all living cheek-by-jowl in a fetid stew of sweat, gin, breath and skin.