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Especially detestable to me is an underfurnished and scrupulously tidy room. Unless the occupant happens to possess great intelligence and a nobility of heart that transcends the sphere of such unimportant material considerations, and allows him to treat his home as a mere tabernacle, I diagnose an empty head and a cold heart.

(Madame Sand doesn't seem a fan of a clear desk policy)

Our social order does not even command the sympathies of its defenders; each of us in dissatisfaction chooses whatever escape suits him best. One throws himself into art, another into science. All of us who have time and money to spare, travel – that is to say, we flee, since surely it is not so much a question of travelling as of getting away? Which of us has not some sorrow to dull, or some yoke to cast off?

The past was his hunting ground; from it came his pleasure and a good deal of everything else. Yet he was not proof against the moment he lived in. The present could snarl at him; could drown his memories so completely that when they surfaced again they were like the burnt tips of matches floating on a puddle, finished and done with.

(from 'The General's Day')

The general's son spoke slow and beautiful French and it clearly gave him great pleasure to hear himself, for he kept his eyes half closed and smiled as he spoke, as if listening to beloved music.

Anticipation was not in Mr Mileson’s life. Remembering, looking back, considering, events and emotions that had been at the time mundane perhaps – this kind of thing was more to his liking. For by hindsight there was pleasure in the stream of time.

(From 'A Meeting in Middle Age', 1964)

Talking of others, old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.

Attempts to make Rome a capital in the style of Paris were to fail. Rome remained a city of the past - ancient, medieval or baroque. It was not a town of theaters and banks, but of churches, palaces and monuments. Some people called it too southern, others too international, others too corrupt, and it soon became fashionable to lament that the capital was not somewhere else.

Successive governments tried hard to catch the imagination and sympathy of the common people in the capital. The results were not always in good taste. Palazzi were converted into government departments, the flora of the Colosseum was stripped off, excavations began on the site of the forums. Hare was later to write that a few years of Italian rule had done more to destroy Rome than the Goths and Vandals together.

Sicily had to endure large-scale military operations.Govone cut off water from villages in the middle of the Sicilian heat& used torture to exact information, burning people alive in their houses.Northeners had little idea of the social and economic derangement which unification had brought to the South, &when feelings of revolt became more intense,this was treated as simple lawlessness calling for police repression.

There is a spectre inside every photograph.

The day was uncommonly hot for autumn. Rich shafts of sunlight poured on to the representational carpet, and the dust-specks played in them like tiny tropical fish.

Le Carré's poetics of the workspace

Soon the gloom of the place seemed to work itself into the fabric of his face, like dust into the complexion of a prisoner.

(Strikes me as a fitting observation on the eve of returning to the workplace ;)

The Italy resulting from the plebiscites seemed artificial &deficient in national character.Italian culture still lacked a distinct identity of its own: the intellectual classes looked to France for their lead &other liberal politicians to England.Regional self-suffiency could not be broken down & there had been no social revolution to convince the peasants that they were participants in,not victims of,the new order.

Vittorio Emanuele became King of Italy in 1861.Because of the challenge of republicanism and the need to overshadow Garibaldi in popular esteem, an official apologetic and panegyric was developed to inflate his reputation.The true picture hidden behind clouds of incense is of a usually insignificant man,good-natured and shrewd,but superstitious and ill-educated, possessing little of the luster and aureole of majesty.

Late that night Kate, on her way to bed, looked into Lou's bedroom. Milky moonlight fell through the open window across the bed. Lou lay on her back with one braceleted arm outside the covers, her upturned toes, her breast, lifted the bedclothes to make a shallow trough between. She looked as touching as Juliet on her tomb. The moonlit drapery was like a drawning by Blake. 'There should be angels', thought Kate.

She refilled the glass and handed it to him, holding it carefully turned one way. He put his hands over hers and twisted the glass round so that he drank from the place her lips had touched.She hoped that he would not sense through her tingling fingers the embarrassment she was feeling, and raked her mind desperately for someting casual to say. Only the weather came to her rescue, as it always does to English people.

'What do we get out of it, I wonder - being parents?' 'It was great fun when they were little'.It was a memory of a memory by now - the hallmark of happiness, that scene.The sun had shone through the dazzling aigrettes of water and made rainbows, the breeze caught the the children and fanned them out. 'It's a pity about love', she said. 'The pain one pays for it with - children, or one's friends. It can't be helped.'

I hate self-made men. They think everyone else should slave as they have done. 'You missed the lot", I'll say to him one day."Grubbing about like that from morning to night, you never lived.What have you got?A great stack of money,a knighthood,the respect of your competitors,and that's about the lot.Not a moment's fun have you had.No one's ever been really pleased to see you and no one will give a damn when you die."

The heat of the white pebbles warms my belly, the salty sea leaves white streaks on my brown skin. It is paradise, but I am not happy. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.

Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness.

Ni Carmen ni Georges Maillot ne lisaient jamais rien. Nous en avions parlé tous les deux et vous m'aviez expliqué gentiment qu'il existe deux sortes de gens: ceux qui font les livres, et ceux sur qui les livres se font, et qui n'ont pas besoin de les lire. Ils les vivent.

Baudelaire is a new type of critic, one almost entirely dependent on his own reactions, his moi. He believes that his reactions to paintings or music or literature are as valid as the things themselves. He is, in every context, an artist in his own right. Criticism, as practised by Baudelaire, is an autonomous discipline.

Romanticism succeeded in literature for far longer than it did in painting. Literary Romanticism is capable of many mutations because it does not rely on standard imagery. For Baudelaire,Romanticism represented the kingship of the imagination, as it did for Delacroix. The final phase of the Baudelairian attitude implies that the cult of images signifies consolation, compensation for the ills of contemporary life.

Napoleon is the presiding genius of mature Romanticism. Even the later phase, represented by Musset and Vigny in literature, by Delacroix in painting, will be steeped in nostalgia for an heroic way of life.

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He bombards it&each time the smoke clears,the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted,he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway.Braque,he says, merely has 'charm'; he has gone back to 'French painting', becoming the 'Vuillard of Cubism'.He tells him his pictures are 'well hung.' Braque replies that Picasso's ceramics are 'well cooked'.

You don't think people change,you say,or ever really can?
I think people change,he says,for sure,but only ever become, essentially, more themselves.
You don't know if that thought is comforting or profoundly sad.
Then where's the hope,you say,if we can never truly begin again,or become,I don't know,something else or better?
He shrugs, and smiles.Each moment,I guess,he says. Each moment, here now, that's what we have.

Colour was regarded as suspect by classical Cubism: it was 'anecdotical', it blurted, it carried too much information, it distracted from the pursuit of form. So it had to be whipped into line - literally: that old French battle between colour and line was now taking a new turn. By 1910-1911 you could have any colour you liked, so long as it was grey, brown or beige.