Hilary Spurling > Quotes

“Interrogated by Pearl about the smell of roasting men and whether the Chinese variety smelled different from white flesh, Wang Amah replied confidently that white meat was coarser, more tasteless and watery, "because you wash yourselves so much.”
― Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth

“Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child's point of view. His mother and his nurse were for long periods the only people he saw, in general the one unchanging element in a peripatetic existence.”
― Hilary Spurling, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

“Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.”
― Hilary Spurling, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

“Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.”
― Hilary Spurling, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time