Jonathan Cracknell

“He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn’t face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Such an inveterate stupidity, such a scorn for literature and art, such a hatred for all the ideas he worshipped, were implanted and anchored in these merchant minds, exclusively preoccupied with the business of swindling and money-making, and accessible only to ideas of politics--that base distraction of mediocrities--that he returned enraged to his home and locked himself in with his books.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“The permutations of English corruption in India were endless”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“optimist. Scratch a little deeper and you will no doubt uncover a great intriguer, but I hope a well-intentioned one. Scratch deeper still, never minding the blood, and perhaps you will find an old White Russian of liberal sympathies but intent even now on rescuing his Tsar from the cellar in Ekaterinburg, or failing his Tsar, the little Tsarevich.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils