Quotes from Philip Hoare

The sea defines us, connects us, separates us. Most of us experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded island – it's why we call our coastal towns 'resorts', despite their air of decay.

Rather than creating a pure Reich out of a Weimar Germany almost glorifying in its hedonistic allure, the Nazi hierarchy would exhibit every symptom of decadence. When the drug-addicted Goering was arrested in 1945, his fingernails were varnished red; on being strip-searched, it was discovered his toenails were painted, too.

The fear of decadence is the fear – and fascination – of the other. It is a fantasy fear of letting go, of the abandonment of principle. In that it is an essentially middle-class fear, for the upper classes with their privilege – literally, private law – were answerable to no one, while the working class were both expendable and by tradition prone to vice

On the other side is chaos, libertinism, vice, danger and the unknown. And the unknown will always remain so to those who do not choose to explore it.

A port city relies on its relationship to elsewhere.

Society before the war showed signs of becoming what French sociey before the Revolution had been – curious, gay, tolerant, reckless and reasonably cynical. After the war I suppose it will be none of these things … The war has ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done.

On the fourth anniversary of the war, peace seemed further away than ever. The military conspirators, and Billing, their pawn, had achieved their aims.

If true, this meant Billing was guilty, if not of treason, then certainly insurrection. In a world worried by revolution and the rise of the radical right, he was a dangerous man.