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Kindle Notes & Highlights
If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it.
There is an excellent line in Ian Fleming’s last Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun: ‘The best drink in the day,’ he observes, ‘is just before the first one.’
Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars.
a university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different. A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books.
Success in politics, journalism, the Civil Service, advertising, the Foreign Office, the City and so many of the grander fields of professional endeavour rely on the ability quickly to master the essentials of a brief, to subdue material to one’s will, to present, promote and pimp, to massage facts and figures and to do all with speed, polish, ease and confidence.
My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?
although it is true that one feels fantastic when one has finished a writing task, it is mostly horrible while one is doing it.
We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.
The moral high ground is easy to perch on if you’re in a cashmere sweater.
I cannot remember which I loved more, my little house in the country, my Aston Martin, my Apple computer or my gold AmEx card. What a styleless arsehole I was,
