“If England wants a happy, well-fed aristocracy, she mustn't have wars. She can't have it both ways.”

“You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underwear. One or the other. Not both.”

“Nothing to be done about it except give her a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever, and she proceeded.”

“She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.”

“She is a waitress at his lordships club.My God! The Proletariat!The lower middle classes, sir.Well, yes, by stretching it a bit, perhaps.”

“...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.”

“That is all, Augustus,' she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green fly.”