Praising nursery rhymes, Vita Sackville-West observed, The direct statement can seldom compare in aesthetic value with the oblique statement — which is probably the ultimate meaning that man sets on that strange devisement he calls art.

It is difficult to argue with much contained in these analyses of the pathology of Japanese emperorism. Certainly emperorism was the value system that provided the foundations of Japanese aggression and bureaucratic fascism.

All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion—or rather as a transition from the subject that started their conversation—such talk had been distressingly out of place.

The Rockwellian palette was what Arkansans would call a gaum of sentiment— sentimentality, the cynical would say. His paintings were what these same cynics would probably call representational, […]