Status Updates From A mille miglia da Kensington

It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.

And it is my advice, when you have to refuse any request that admits of no argument, you should never give reasons or set out your objections; to do so leads to counter-reasons and counter-objections. So to Hugh Lederer I said No.

And I will say, now, that I learned a lot about upper-class habits while I was with Mackintosh & Tooley. In the end I concluded it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the latter can get on very well on its own.

I had to talk to authors. Colin didn't, he said, envy me my job, amiably adding one of his more regular maxims, 'The best author is a dead author.'

At this point the man whom I came to call the pisseur de copie enters my story. I forget which of the French symbolist writers of the late 19th century denounced a hack writer as a urinator of journalistic copy in the phrase pisseur de copie, but the description remained in my mind, and I attached it to a great many of the writers who hung around or wanted to meet Martin York.