“There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.”

“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”

“The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.”

“Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.”

“If this is dying I don't think much of it.”

“Discretion is not the better part of biography.”

“It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.”

“A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile”

“Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".”

“For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.”

“It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.”