Alexander

“Oh no – you think – he is typing rubbish about tofu to put off confirmation of the awful truth: that he is about to foist on us the feared Habsburg monarchy sea-mammal analogy.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“It is years since we have been to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford together because it happens to own his final masterpiece, that spectral twilit farewell to a lost world, Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, a picture that on our final joint trip provoked poorly judged joke snoring noises. Still, even the happiest marriage has to be balanced sometimes by one partner silently soaking a pillow with tears in the darkness and whispering, ‘But I will always love you Claude and will never, never let you down.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades.”
― Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life

“The Danes are so full of joie de vivre that they practically sweat it. In a corner of Europe where the inhabitants have the most blunted concept of pleasure (in Norway, three people and a bottle of beer is a party; in Sweden, the national sport is suicide), the Danes’ relaxed attitude to life is not so much refreshing as astonishing.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe