Quotes from Philip Hoare

Had it not been for Billing's eccentricity, short attention span and lack of application, his inventions may well have had proper success

trials held at 'aero shows' on Southampton Water were attended by 'alert Germans

Billing was at Tower Hill, addressing the 12,000 police who had called a general strike ('Traffic Managing Itself' headlined The Times, noting that at least the reprehensible strikers had agreed to work in the event of an air raid)

1917 (or possibly 1918) poem, 'Greater Love': 'Red lips are not so red/ As the stained stones kissed by the English dead

I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.

The absence of war did not mean that the vacuum would necessarily be replaced by peace. In the no man's land between Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe revolted and Britain faced chaos as the civil unrest of wartime spread.

It is extraordinary that among these learned and professional men, only a deluded lunatic appears to have known the meaning of the word, and that from reading – or being told about – the work of a German sexologist. It is, perhaps, indicative of the general ignorance of sex (and, indeed, of the lower status of women)

The emergent post-war fascist groups all believed in the Protocols: British intelligence reports noted that their meetings heard audience remarks such as 'Kill the Jews', 'Perish Judea', 'We hate them', and 'Bastards'.

For the next twenty years she would tour the world in search of artistic recognition, a futile quest, 'because she mistook her indisputable uniqueness for greatness

The administration of the country appeared to me then – as it does now – as a sorry and sordid play, in which the politicians are the actors, the Pressmen are the dramatists, vested interests pack the house, and – the public pay the price!

William Leonard Courtney (then sixty-one-year-old theatre and literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, he had been an Oxford professor of philosophy until forced to resign when his homosexuality became public knowledge)

They toured India, after calls for Maud to be banned from performing there; imperial values imagined that Maud's erotic dance would excite the 'rich native' to an unsafe degree

An exaggerated clitoris might even drive a woman to an elephant.' This remark – unprecedented in the courts of British justice – elicited loud laughter.

On gizzards of gulls, hawks and owls, The heat of lizards, spurs of fowls, Bones of pigs, air-sacs of eagles, Moaning dingos, barking beagles; Sleek opossums, prickly hedgehogs, Buffaloes, dormice, wolves and dogs

One of the greatest bores on earth is the Anti-Semite, and for him, at least, the show should be a liberal instruction. He will be disappointed to find no examples of those peculiar knives used in the ritual murders of young boys ...'.

lately a scholar at Eton, who aroused everyone's suspicions by knowing Latin and Greek [at the Billing trial, the judge made a point of not knowing any Greek, and disparaged those who did]

English decadence as a cause of the war, which had first appeared in the war's early months, and had been a commonplace of English war talk since then. The war was to have been the Condy's Fluid that would cleanse society of its decadence;

This man is dangerous,' said Lloyd George. 'He doesn't want anything.

Billing was an archetypal playboy, 'fascinated by fast aircraft, fast speed-boats, fast cars and fast women – he was highly attractive to women

the political radicals from whom he took his ideas, and with whom he had become closely associated, were certainly not mild eccentrics. In fact, they were busy inventing a virulent British strain of fascism.

illegitimate births rose by thirty per cent in Britain during wartime. Where eligible males were lacking, young boys became the objects of older women's affections; prisoners-of-war and 'even unattractive men suddenly found themselves successful and desired by women

In opposition rose the 'Die-Hard' Unionists championed by the Duke of Northumberland; reactionary representatives of the landed gentry who believed in compulsory military service, social welfare, expanded military and naval strength, an end to 'alien' immigration, and armed resistance to Irish Home Rule

the Die-Hards cited the fact that it took five times the number of British troops to suppress the Boer guerillas.

Others such as Baden-Powell and Kipling were concerned that western civilisation would dissolve if its white blood was thinned.