My amiability, which is in many cases the result of indifference; my indulgency, which is sincere enough, and is due to the fact that I see clearly how unjust men are to one another; my conscientious habits, which afford me real pleasure, and my infinite capacity for enduring ennui, attributable perhaps to my having been so well inoculated by ennui during my youth that it has never taken since, are all to be explained by the circle in which I lived, and the profound impressions which I received.

[…] their political tactics were to be more closely coordinated with Moscow and their latitudinarian approach to cultural affairs was to be replaced by Zdanov’s uncompromising thesis of the ‘two cultures’.

a race of disobedient children, a progeny of beggars, a nation of bare subsisters on the soil

For Mrs. Jones the draper’s wife to be able to boast that she bought a silk pincushion at twenty times its value from the Countess of Belminster—for Mrs. Smith the cheesemongeress to be able to show a photograph of Lady Eleanor Gore-Layton, signed with her own hand, are occasions that do not occur twice in a lifetime.