Quotes from Clive James

Dining out meant shepherd's pie and bitter at the Anchor, Bankside. The Anchor was a little sooty brick Georgian pub on the Embankment.

The more nobly behaved the family, the less chance it stood.

Tacitus, "qui abrégeoit tout parce qu'il voyoit tout." ("He abridged everything because he saw everything." Perfect.)

ideology itself the perpetual enemy of realism.

fraternité: "Be my brother or I will kill you.

its author's enviable knack for assessing the significance of what everybody else had already seen and his congenital propensity for inflating the results into a speculative rigmarole that nobody else would ever think or could even follow.

That, in fact, was the joke that killed him: he was arrested soon after making

There is no crueller tyranny," said Montesquieu, "than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.

role of Amidala, Queen of Naboo, the Bad Hair Planet,

the young daughter of Sejanus is taken away to be killed. "What have I done?" Tacitus has her say. "Where are you taking me? I won't do it again.

We have heard that voice before, but it was later: it was only yesterday, in the Ukraine, at one of the Dubno shooting pits,

1942. All the victims were naked. The German engineer Hermann Graebe recalled one moment particularly. "I still clearly remember a dark-haired, slim girl who pointed to herself as she passed close to me and said, 'Twenty-three.

in those days I construed absence of explicit opposition as a whole-hearted endorsement.

The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is.

The whole world, if you wait long enough Is full of falling.

I forgave them, having surmised – correctly, as it turned out – that America was merely first in achieving a level of average income so high that even the mentally underprivileged were able to travel, and that shortly all the other industrialised countries would start exporting idiots too.

What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam? —WILLIAM HAZLITT,

Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I,

But we should be cautious when we spot comfort creeping into the historic memory: if it climbs the wall like a stain, it could be a sign that the truth is being drowned.

and took up arms again as a Resistance fighter in World War II. He was caught, tortured and executed in 1944.

the damaging notion that obscure is the way philosophy should sound.

An army that never leaves its defences Is bound to be defeated, said Napoleon, Who left them, and was defeated.

Sartre, who respected Aron's credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.)

The less comprehensible he was, the more responsible he was held to be. Here was no lightweight.