Status Updates From Un retrato de época

"She once said to me, about the Roman occupation of Britain--in her most downright tone: 'Don't tell me' (I wasn't telling her), 'that all those Roman soldiers lived all that time in England and didn't leave a lot of Roman babies behind them. And a very good thing, too, I dare say.'"

"He was really fond of music and tried, with remarkably poor results, to make us sing. At concerts he indulged in a special kind of intellectual sandwich, by reading certain passages of Greek plays, while listening to certain pieces of music."

Funnier and funnier all the time.

"The rules of propriety are supposed to have made life very complicated in the last century, but in practice, I can't say that I found nineteenth-century decency harder to manage than twentieth-century indecency. In fact, I always find it easier to pretend to be shocked, when I am not shocked, than to pretend not to be shocked when I am."

"She is said to have wept on President Lincoln's shoulder in order to obtain promotion for her husband...I then learn the true story. She went, with two brothers-in-law, to an arranged interview with the President; saying to herself, 'After all he's only a man like any other,' by which she meant that, of course, she could get him to do what she wanted."

"The only words I can remember her saying were a comparison between her two husbands: 'Yes, poor Francis liked his beef quite red and underdone, but Gerard would not eat it unless it was well cooked and brown.' A good way of remembering the difference between them."

This book's a laugh a page. I haven't enjoyed anything so much in a long while.

"When a French woman decides to be shabby, she does it better than anyone else."

This book is so funny. Gwen Raverat is one of those authors you wish you could be friends with.