The Marquise de Sevigne

"There are three important things in life. The first is to eat well, and - I have forgotten the others."

Adam Kirsch on Engels

Many of Engels' lurid details and damning statistics come from official reports like Edwin Chadwick's "Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain", which was commissioned by a Whig government and published under a Tory one. Indeed, while Engels insists that the workers cannot hope for redress from a bourgeois-aristocratic Parliament, he can't help but note that "although the middle classes at the moment are the main - indeed the only - power in Parliament, nevertheless the last session (1844) was in effect a continuous debate on working-class conditions. All this suggests that fare from being obdurate, England's ruling class were taking action - slowly and as yet inadequately - to solve the problems caused by the industrial revolution. These problems were, it is useful to remember, totally unprecedented, not just in English but in human history. The sudden eruption of vast polluted slums in the North of England baffled both the institutions of government and the prevailing theories of economics and society.

Hilary Mantel on starsuckers

We live in a society basted in self-regard, our moralists tell us: fat and dozy on the lion's share of the world's resources, polluting the seas and burning fossil fuels, we gaze in loving torpor at our own reflection, and the gnat-bite of recession barely disturbs our narcissistic trance. More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realisation - a "life well lived", as Keith Thomas puts it. But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No: we want to be celebrities. We dream of instant, global fame. We expect it to enrich us, gratify us, but are less concerned that it outlast us. Once, priorities were different.

Taki on Porfirio Rubirosa

Had he been wearing his seatbelt nothing would have happened to him. But had he been wearing his belt, he would not have been Porfirio Rubirosa.

H L Mencken on Los Angeles

A 1926 piece explaining why Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who has been caught in a love-nest that year, needed Los Angeles to succeed in her holy calling.

...Los Angeles was a pasture fore-ordained for evangelists, and she was the first one to give it anything low enough for its taste and comprehension. The osteopaths, the chiropracters, and other suck quacks, had long marked and occupied it. It swarmed with swamis, spiritualists, Christian scientists, crystal-gazers and the allied necromancers. It offered brilliant pickings for real-estate speculators, oil stock brokers, wire-tappers and so on. But the town pastors were not up to its opportunities. They ranged from melancholy High Church Episcopalians, laboriously trying to interest retired Iowa alfafa kings in ritualism, down to struggling Methodists and Baptists, as earnestly seeking to inflame the wives of the same monarchs with the crimes of the Pope. All this was over the heads of their trade. The Iowans longed for something they could get their teeth into. They wanted magic and noise. They wanted an excuse to whoop.

V.S.Naipal on contemporary culture

It is terrible this very plebeian culture, an aggressive plebeian culture that celebrates itself for being plebeian.