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Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in basin, thought Smiley: but Schiller had forgotten the bureaucrats.

The Empire was a product of the rise of global capitalism, an international order underwritten by Britain until replaced by America in the 20th century. Imperialism’s role in brokering global capitalism and deepening westernization was fundamentally more significant than the British Empire per se.

Thoughts ran around his brain like hares. He didn’t know how to catch them.

A couplet of Auden’s rang in his mind: let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one.

‘The longing for a child is a strange force. To attend to its needs, to give it comfort and love – I suppose there is that in all of us. There is a streak of simple generosity that we do not easily understand.’

‘The older I become, Mr. Dutt, the more I realize that one understands very little. I believe one is meant not to understand. The best things are complex and mysterious. And must remain so.’

Affonso had quickly begun to feel a high regard for Craft,by that gentleman of good English stock,cultivated & strong,with serious manners,rigid habits,perceptive and upright thinking.They had both met as enthusiasts of Tacitus,Macaulay & Burke & even the Lakist poets.He was great at chess;his character had gained,through long & arduous travels,the rich solidity of bronze.For Affonso da Maia,‘that was truly a man’.

The territories that formed the British Empire ranged from tiny islands to vast segments of the world's major continents. Stretched across each ocean and time zone, the proud claim that 'the sun never set on the British Empire' was actually true (some said that this was because the British could not be trusted in the dark).

This world of fado singers, of beech trees, seemed to Carlos worthy of a study, a novel. This immediately led to talk of Zola’s L’assommoir and realism – and Alencar immediately, wiping the drops of soup from his moustache, begged that this latrinaire literature not to be discussed at the proper hour of dinner.

Well, as soon as I can, I go straight to Paris! That’s the place! This place is a pigsty…If I don’t go there every year, believe me, I even start to get sick. That little boulevard, eh!...O, I love it…

Now, the moral of this tale, childish perhaps, but heartfelt, seems to be that man is not made to live with trees, stones, the clear sky, the azure sea, flowers and mountains, but with his fellow-men.

In the stormy days of our youth, we imagine that solitude is a sure refuge from the assaults of life, a certain balm for the wounds of battle. (ctd in comment section)

Latin was a scholar’s luxury.

'But finally, the classics,’ the abbot ventured timidly.

-What classics! Man’s first duty is to live. And for that, it is necessary to be healthy and strong. All sensible education consists of this: creating health, strength, and habits, developing the animal exclusively, arming it with great physical superiority. As if it had no soul. The soul comes later….The soul is another luxury.

Affonso ended up discovering an intimate charm in the view.It was like a seascape,framed in white stonework, suspended from the blue sky showing the fleeting episodes of a peaceful river life with always in the background two white houses full of expression, sometimes sparkling and emitting rays from the glowing windows;sometimes taking on a pensive air,covered in the tender pinks of sunset,almost like a human blush

Emptiness & stillness terrify me,symmetry and strict order overwhelm me with gloom &if I could accept the idea of eternal damnation,my hell would certainly be to live eternally in a house ruled by meticulous order, where nothing is ever left lying about,where no animal is admitted.You may burn all the carpets in the world,if I may enjoy them only on condition of never seeing a child,a cat or dog frisking over them!

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.