Status Updates From A Time of Gifts (Trilogy, #1)

Magnifico diario di viaggio risalente ad un viaggio pedonale negli anni trenta, sono soltanto al primo volume di tre ma si legge già chiaramente il capolavoro. Consigliatissimo a chi ama questo genere.

From his demeanor and the excellence of his English I think a stranger in a railway carriage would have taken him for an Englishman but of a half-patrician, half-scholarly kind which even then seemed threatened with extinction. I knew that his life had been full of movement and adventures, quite apart from his two marriages….

There was an enormous desk covered with photographs, a box of cigars… and… a number of silver cigarette cases…each of them embossed with a different gold monogram. (This … was an invariable item in Central European country houses, particularly in Hungary. They were presents exchanged on special occasions, and always between men: for standing godfather, being best man at a wedding, second in a duel, and so on.)

[P]unctiliously exact in the historical plays, Shakespeare didn’t care a fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town - Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights - the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is….