Philip Hoare > Quotes

“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. And although it seems constant, it is never the same. One day the shore will be swept clean, the next covered by weed; the shingle itself rises and falls. Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set free.”
― Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

“Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.”
― Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

“dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we’d like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins.”
― Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

“Dane lived above a greengrocer’s shop at 26 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, with her secretary, Olwen Bowen, herself a writer of children’s books, but who now devoted herself to the care of her companion. ‘One climbed up a rickety staircase and there was Winifred, surrounded by her paintings, sculptures, a piano and goodness knows how many books, where she would give many after-the-theatre parties . . .”
― Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography of Noel Coward

“I turn another corner. There thay are.
In a heavy gilt frame too big for them, another pair of eyes. I'm aware of my own stare, embarrassed at standing so close. I step back and fix on the black pearl dangling from the red beret. Things could go either way. It's been a harsh career for a fragile spirit: conceived in Venice, born in Nuremberg, sold in Amsterdam; trafficked in London, given refuge in Berlin, forced to flaunt their wares for a few marks per head, and now trolled out in Milan.
This picture changed sex, I tell a pair of passers-by, a shaven-headed couple. They move on”
― Philip Hoare, Albert & the Whale

“The trouble with the world is, Frankie, that there are too many ideals and too little horse sense . . . Human beings don’t like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else . . . they’re not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who’ll give ’em half a chance.”
― Philip Hoare, Noel Coward: A Biography of Noel Coward

“You assume you know your home. It’s only when you return that you realise how strange it is.”
― Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

“the radical right sought victory without compromise; ironically, their bête noire, the left-wing Lloyd George, seemed the only man likely to achieve this. The Unionists backed Lloyd George’s coalition government, but in the continuing stalemate of 1917-18, the right became restless, and campaigned for Lloyd George’s removal.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“this post-trial assessment by Lord Buckmaster: The licence was accordingly refused but the refusal was not due to an adverse judgement of the play. It may be hoped that the trial of the criminal proceedings is now forgotten and the only question is on what grounds found in the play itself can it be regarded as unfit for performance.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“On gizzards of gulls, hawks and owls, The heat of lizards, spurs of fowls, Bones of pigs, air-sacs of eagles, Moaning dingos, barking beagles; Sleek opossums, prickly hedgehogs, Buffaloes, dormice, wolves and dogs”
― Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside

“Whales existed before man, but they have been known to us only for two or three generations: until the invention of underwater photography, we hardly knew what they looked like. It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the first free-swimming whale was photographed underwater. The first underwater film of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like.”
― Philip Hoare, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea

“Hugh Walpole met him at Marie Stopes’s house in Norbury: ‘something of a shock. How astonished was I when this rather bent, crooked-bodied, hideous old man came into the room. How could he ever have been beautiful, for he has a nose as ugly as Cyrano’s with a dead-white bulbous end?’ Douglas talked nonstop, in a shrill voice. ‘When someone he hates like Wells is mentioned, he gets so angry that all his crooked features light up and his nose achieves a sort of sombre glow”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Throughout the war, officers were routinely sent narcotics through the post by loved ones. Many pilots – with their pitifully short life expectancy – used morphine, and other members of the armed forces became addicts after morphine treatment for wounds”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Protesting against the coalition government, they advocated conscription up to fifty, closure of all German-owned businesses, internment of enemy aliens, conscription in Ireland and counter air raids against German towns.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Billing was at Tower Hill, addressing the 12,000 police who had called a general strike (‘Traffic Managing Itself’ headlined The Times, noting that at least the reprehensible strikers had agreed to work in the event of an air raid)”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“the refusal of a licence – the banning of Salome – was entirely due to Billing’s antics, and not to any serious objection by the Lord Chamberlain;”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.”
― Philip Hoare

“Billing was an archetypal playboy, ‘fascinated by fast aircraft, fast speed-boats, fast cars and fast women – he was highly attractive to women”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Smallwood the Coalition candidate was returned; and the Imperialist of 27 October offered a £500 reward ‘to any person furnishing evidence to support a successful petition under “The Corrupt Practices Act”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“editor of the English Review and accomplished nationalist – was then aged seventy, an ‘international expert on anti-semitism”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“If all the smart restaurants were closed down, the ‘flapper’ trade would probably close down also, and the flappers, disdaining the more humble eating-houses they were wont to frequent, may even return to their homes, which they left to imperil, if not to sacrifice, their chastity.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“It is extraordinary that among these learned and professional men, only a deluded lunatic appears to have known the meaning of the word, and that from reading – or being told about – the work of a German sexologist. It is, perhaps, indicative of the general ignorance of sex (and, indeed, of the lower status of women),”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“The smoky, feverish, frenetic atmosphere was as unlike the genteel debutante balls of Mayfair as the mechanised war of the Western Front was removed from the cavalry charges of nineteenth-century stage-set battles.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“This man is dangerous,’ said Lloyd George. ‘He doesn’t want anything.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“In June 1918, it was announced in The Times that soldiers would henceforth require a doctor’s prescription to obtain twelve named drugs: ‘barbitone, benzamine lactate, benzamine hydrochloride, chloral hydrate, coca, cocaine, codeine, diamorphine, Indian hemp, opium, morphine, and sulphonal and its homologues, and any salts, preparations, derivatives, or admixtures prepared from or with any these drugs.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Alfred Baker, Town Clerk of Hertford and Treasurer of the Society of Vigilantes. Their campaign slogan ran: HINDER THE HUNS PARALYSE PROFITEERS PURIFY POLITICS WIN THE WAR”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“wrote White, expressing the firm belief that ‘England will best Germany because Germany is wicked, and the English, if not salt of the earth, are “good” men”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“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”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“Billing’s apparent defence of Christian values and Messianic pose brought him the bizarre support of the Christian Scientists, who had decided that he was ‘the Saviour, Christ the King, come to redeem them in this moment of national peril”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

“When the more lurid popular newspapers in England mentioned men in women’s clothing ‘nigger-dancing’ at Chelsea parties, the ‘blame’ was laid on the frontline custom of soldiers donning dresses for troop shows.”
― Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century