Evelyn Waugh

"Dont hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them."

"We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad..." (Part One, Chapter One)"

"There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit."

"I had warned my father that my viva might mean a second. It meant a third, and I was overcome with regret, not, I am ashamed to say, for the giddy nights, but for the sober ones. I had not done much work, but I had done some. Had I known I was only to get a third I would not have wasted my time."

"Chokey thinks religion is just divine."

"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."

"Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute."

"So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. Lets surprise her, said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded."

"His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime."

"The lady said, "Its no good trying to buy a paper here. That Sir William Beveridge is going to abolish want, so all the papers were sold out". Later that day or the next day I asked him to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, "How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?" He paused and said, "I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it". Evelyn Waugh said, "I get mine spreading alarm and despondency" — this was in the height of the war — "and I get more satisfaction than you do". So he did not meet with universal acclamation, but nearly everyone admired Beveridge at that time. He was a wonderful man."

"In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now its lyric verse."

"Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph.D., Llanabba Castle, N.Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential;first-class games essential..."