Anthony Burgess (1917 – 1993)
English writer whose novels include the Malayan trilogy, A Clockwork Orange, the Enderby cycle, Nothing Like The Sun, Earthly Powers and The Kingdom Of The Wicked.
As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.
Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.
The dog looked up through its hairy yashmak and farted.
‘Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves....We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilized temperate climate.’
‘....There was a good deal of drunkenness - ... There was lechery, nakedness. It was a warm afternoon,’ he added, as if to excuse the nakedness....
‘I saw the ceremony between the Empress and Gaius Silius and I assumed it was all a game. There was a great deal of laughter and little solemnity. Then the marriage or mock marriage was .... consummated at once and in public. And, in sympathy as it were, the other guests - A great mass of naked bodies. Men and women. Fornication for them. There were boys there too, Ganymedes. ....
‘And when does Gaius Silius think he can strike the blow that will secure him the imperial c -’
I do not think,’ Narcissus said, ‘that Gaius Silius has such an ambition. He is a weak man besotted by the erotic, no more.’
'My darling one....I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.'
...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.
To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.
'What's it going to be then, eh?'
Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world....
She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.
Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…
Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all.
…the cold deflation of crapula…
The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.
...the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.
Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him....
Pornography….the reader panting, eventually masturbating
‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’
...the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world....