Memories and inspirations

I had never come across commonplace books until I met up with my school friend Paul Foot in Oxford in 1958. The idea, he explained, was that you kept a notebook in which you transcribed anything interesting you came across in the course of your reading. I started doing it the following year. The first two of the following quotes are from D. H. Lawrence, then my favourite writer:

Horace is already a bit of a mellow varsity man who never quite forgot Oxford.

No old world tumbles except when a young one shoves it over. And why should one howl when one’s grandfather is pushed over a cliff? Goodbye, grandfather, now it’s my turn.

Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be believed. (Beachcomber)

Wherewould we be without a sense of humour? (Very slight pause) Germany! (Willie Rushton)

In real life the women pursue the men. It’s only in the novels of Somerset Maugham that the men pursue the women (Sefton Delmer)

There is no reciprocity. Men love women — women love children — children
love hamsters. (Alice Thomas Ellis)

Northern people in every country like to think of themselves as more honest and straightforward than those further south. (A.J. P. Taylor)

No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit. (Hitler)

The Waughs

When I first went to boarding school at the age of six my father threatened to change my name to something like Stinkbottom. Although I knew he was only joking I never knew quite how far he would take his jokes, and for the first year of school life I lived in dread of every school assembly in case the
headmaster suddenly announced: ‘The boy you have hitherto known as Waugh will in future be called Stinkbottom.’ (Auberon Waugh)

I am reading Proust for the first time. I think he was mentally defective.