But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat – it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older – as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice “at the closing of the day”. I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer’s time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

The gamin Gavroche puts in a strong plea for mercy, and his sister Eponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with her, might have been a great, and is actually the most interesting, character. But Cosette – the cosseted Cosette – Hugo did not know our word or he would have seen the danger – is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll, and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable.

The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.

I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.