Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Immortal Claud Cockburn

Three quotes:

"A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's."

"He had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig."

"If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment."


This last reminds me of the Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey, who, being asked on Desert Island Discs whether there was any Irish expression equivalent to maƱana, replied "There are several, but none of them convey quite the same sense of terrifying urgency".

Haughey saying this is a very clear directly experienced memory of mine from childhood, so it was almost certainly a different man on a different program. Saying something else.

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