Patrick French > Quotes

“Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks, and moved with an amphibian gait.”
― Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul

“Was he barking mad?”
― Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer

“I had forgotten the squalor, the rhythmic nose-blowing, the screeching announcements, the theatrical ejection of phlegm, the elbowing, staring, shouting and poking, the sheer numbers that managed to crowd into each carriage and onto each bunk, the sense you had on China’s railways that you were in a land of people—1.27 billion at the last time of counting.”
― Patrick French, Tibet, Tibet