Status Updates From A Proper Marriage (Children...

Unfortunately nine-tenths of the time of any political leader must be spent not on defeating his opponents, but on manipulating the stupidities of his own side.

She felt, as usual, that she was entering a new world when she turned into the squalid little street she was looking for. Extreme poverty lay a hundred yards from wealth - as, indeed, it tends to do, but in this case it coincided with a physical ghetto. Five parallel streets, each about half a mile long, held the Coloured community. This was still the nineteenth century.

Well, good luck with the battle. All that’s wrong with him,’ she pronounced in her maidenly and demure way, ‘is that his property instinct is outraged.’

She immediately began chiding herself for her utter dishonesty. The instinct to comply, to please, seemed to her more and more unpleasant and false. Yet she had to reassure Douglas and kiss him before he left if she was not to feel guilty and lacking as a woman.

It was quite impossible that this man should be her husband. She was married to one of the boys; he would always, all his life, be one of the boys. At sixty he would still be a schoolboy. There was no escape from it.

..the darkskinned people had only the vaguest idea that the war had started,and the authorities’first concern was to explain to them..why it was their patriotic task to join their white masters in taking up arms against the monster across the seas in a Europe they could scarcely form a picture of,whose crimes consisted of invading other people’scountries and forming a society based on the conception of a master race.

In any colony, a world crisis is always seen first in terms of native uprising.

He says he is now a Trotskyist. I said that I was sure this would be a great blow to Stalin, but that I would infinitely prefer my own son to be a Trotskyist rather than the town buffoon, it at least shows an interest in public affairs. This annoyed your friend exceedingly.

This the nightmare, this the nightmare of a class and generation: repetition. And although Martha had read nothing of the great interpreters of the nightmare, she had been soaked in the minor literature of the last thirty years, which had dealt with very little else: a series of doomed individuals, carrying their doom inside them, like the seeds of fatal disease. Nothing could alter the pattern.

This admirable scheme came to nothing, because the authorities in Britain had not yet made up their minds how the colonies were to be used. There was only one principle yet decided, and this was that the men from the colonies were clearly all officer material, because of lives spent in ordering the black population about.

‘Another of life’s little disillusionments: you’ll find the newspapermen are as stupid as they sound. One reads what they say, when young, with admiration for the accomplished cynicism they display; when one gets older one discovers they really mean what they write.

With what relief did I return to this country, where a spade is still called a spade and I can use the vocabulary that I was taught to use during my admirable education. I can no longer say, ‘The kaffirs are getting out of hand’, that is true. But I can say, ‘The blacks need firm treatment.’ That’s something. I am grateful for it.’

Half a dozen chairs away, Mrs Talbot and Elaine were discussing with a third lady a new method of cutting sandwiches

‘You’re the sort of man who’d choose a wife because she had a good pelvis,’ she said.