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for if there is one thing more mentally upsetting to a family than death, it must be (on
account of its rarity) resurrection.
Michael Arlen and Noel Coward, two men whose deft orchestrations of nerves without emotions, cynicism without satire, achieved a success that must have increased even their own disillusionment.
the fact that all seemed to depend on the workings of one abnormal human mind gave every amateur psychologist an equal chance with politicians and crystal-gazers.
Such talk, during the winter of 1938-1939, was heresy in a country that permitted heresy, but could not regard it as in good taste.
Curious how one had to simulate some normal activity or purpose in life, even if one hadn't one,
one did not, unless one were peculiar, wait hours for a
desire to clarify itself.
"I used to be quite a good Shylock, though I say it myself—and of course it's a fine acting part, and the trial scene has wonderful moments. But taking it all in all, you know, it's a bad play—a bad play. Why do they always choose it for school use? The pound of flesh—gruesome. The Jewish villain—disgustingly anti-Semitic. And a woman lawyer—stark feminism... Oh, a bad play, my dear sir.
And that, of course, was the point. The gentlemen in Salute the Flag lived up to the ninepenny-seat idea of gentlemen; they were much realer than the real thing.
the parson who sometimes preached a sermon attacking the show as indecent (good publicity if you could get it),
One of these clerics, with whom Smith got into conversation, commented that the Church and the theatre were now potential allies, being both sufferers from the same public indifference—"Your leaky roof and my leaky roof are the price paid for the new cathedrals of Mammon." Whereupon he pointed across the street to a new cinema advertising a film which, so it turned out after further conversation, they had both of them recently enjoyed.
astoundingly conventional good looks.
He was a trifle nervous as he changed into the uniform of a British second lieutenant, but not more so than he often was at times when people would never guess it. Quite a natural nervousness too; he knew that many actors and public speakers were always like that, it was really abnormal not to be.
It was, indeed, one of those
trains that seem to exist for no reason at all except to wander through the English countryside at hours when no one wants to travel, stopping here and there at places where no one could possibly have any business, especially on a Sunday morning, and all with an air of utter vagrancy, like that of cattle browsing or a woman polishing her nails—a halt here for several minutes, then an interval of movement, even a burst of speed, then a slow-down to hardly a pace at all, and so on.
Whenever he put his head out of the window at a station, another head, red-haired and a boy's, was leaning out three coaches in front, and this somehow began to suggest that he and the boy were alone on the train—final survivors of something or else first pioneers of something else.
"But it was YOU I married," he said, "not your names."
either a worldly success or a beloved failure —the two classifications that claim a roughly equal number of adherents among the clergy.
"making trouble wherever we go,"
—every man, he added, should have some small matter to which he attaches undue importance, always provided that he realizes the undueness.
that deadliest of modern diseases—popular approval without private faith; it will die because it demanded a crusade and we gave it a press campaign,
because a time may also come when it won't be enough to love England as a tired business man loves a nap after lunch. We may be called upon to love her as the Irish love Ireland—darkly, bitterly, and with a hatred for some who have loved her less and themselves more."
the unrealness of counting able-bodied men as a national burden just because they're listed as unemployed, and figures in bank ledgers as assets just because they're supposed to represent riches.
