Disneyworld... is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.
English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit. ... Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensuously up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the sweet warm beds, kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden, English bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.
Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.
Having lost the last war, they are currently enjoying a "Wirtschaftswunder," which can be briefly translated as "The best way to own a Mercedes is to build one."
In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, I know one boy who won't be sweating. I intend to raise my coffin-lid briskly, throw a few things into an overnight bag, and, whistling something appropriate, prepare to meet my Maker.
The Act of God designation on all insurance policies; which means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.
Can anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.
There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in?