Scorn by Matthew; Parris Read Free Book Online Page B

too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs.
Boris Johnson on Portsmouth
    An inverted pyramid of piffle.
Boris Johnson on allegations against himself
    A small nodule of erupted spleen at the eastern edge of England.
Camilla Long on Thanet
    They will steal the very teeth of your mouth as you walk the streets. I know it from experience.
Judge William Arabin on the people of Uxbridge
    New York … That unnatural city where everyone is an exile, none more so than the American.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.
Phyllis Diller
    I am faced with a typically New York problem, which is how to bring my mediocrity before the public.
Kurt Vonnegut
    London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
    I don’t know what London’s coming to – the higher the buildings, the lower the morals.
Noël Coward
    Rome’s just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I’d say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.
Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr Enderby
    The young Cambridge group, the group that stood for ‘freedom’ and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering, murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
    You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
William Hazlitt, The Ignorance of the Learned
    Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended tovisit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.
Baedeker’s Great Britain
    Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
Elizabeth Drew
    Bugger Bognor.
George V, alleged last words when told by his doctor that he would soon be well enough to visit Bognor Regis; also claimed as the king’s response to the proposal to rename the town Bognor Regis in honour of its recuperative effect on His Majesty
    Brighton looks like a town which is helping police with their enquiries.
Keith Waterhouse, in the Evening Standard
    Very flat, Norfolk.
Noël Coward, Private Lives
    Roast beef in human form.
Horace Walpole on the inhabitants of Norfolk
    Shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave and he will rise and steal a horse.
Lancashire saying
    California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
Joan Didion
    The continental United States slopes gently from east to west, with the result that everything with a screw loose rolls into California.
John Naughton
    In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.
Mark Twain
    If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
General Philip Sheridan

 
    Race
    We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of and made of shit)…
Imamu Amiri Baraka, Black Magic, ‘A school of prayer’
    One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folks is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
H.L. Mencken
    I wouldn’t know, I’m from Alabama.
An African-American responds to President Nixon, having been asked, at a celebration of Ghana’s independence, what it felt like to be free.
    I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to