There was something impressive in his total lack of interest in the fate of all persons except himself.

I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some ‘ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

Denigration of ancestors was more agreeable to him than banter regarding the order of peerage to which he belonged. Not for the first time that evening one was conscious of the bones of an old world pomposity displayed beneath the skin of advanced political thought.

Widmerpool smiled and nodded in a manner to indicate extreme slyness.

All love affairs are different cases, yet, at the same time, each is the same case.

To tell the truth, in spite of what I felt for Jean, marriage, although looming up on all sides, still seemed a desperate venture to be postponed almost indefinitely.

In the end most things in life — perhaps all things — turn out to be appropriate.

Like the Soviet luncheon party — some of the same guests — there was a distinctly political flavour about the people collected, before the performance, in the Stevens drawing-room, MPs from both sides of the house, some African political representatives.

He piled his luggage, bit by bit, on to a taxi; and passed out of my life for some twenty years.

although by then I no longer thought about her, there is always a morbid interest in following the subsequent career of a woman with whom one has once been in love.

Accustomed, like so many literary men of that decade, to describe himself as a communist, he may indeed have been a member of the Communist Party.

He had been, of course, a supporter of Blum’s ‘Popular Front’, but, within the periphery of ‘Leftism’, his shifting preferences were unpredictable; nor did he keep his relations informed on such matters.

In the course of a dozen years or more of the Widmerpools married life many stories had gone round, the least of them lurid enough to imply the union could scarcely persist a week longer, yet it had persisted.

When such scraps of gossip are committed to paper, the words bear a heavier weight than when the same information is imparted huskily between draughts of champagne, in the noise of a crowded room

From their earliest beginnings, the Free French possessed an advantage over the other Allies — and ourselves — of an issue of Algerian wine retailed at their canteens at a shilling a bottle.

He turned his attention to her, in the manner of his particular brand of narcissism, determined to make a conquest, separate and individual, of everyone sitting at the table.

A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing by one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality.

There was no irreplaceable divergence between these two accounts, although, when it came to telling a story in which veracity had to be measured against picturesque detail, neither could be called pedantically veracious

“You know, Nicholas, it is wise to take good advice about such a thing as marriage. I hope you have done so yourself. I have thought about the subject a good deal, and you are always welcome to my views.”

I thought about the party for a time, whether there had really been a Turkish Ambassadress, whom Proust found a great bore; then, like the Narrator himself in his childhood days, fell asleep early.