Devil of a State

There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.

A…taxi…Chinese youth…”You,” he said.

…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.

…wild-life protection cranks, birth control propagandists…

Lydgate opened the sort of letter…”My dear husband I very good…I come in flying ship…we be very happy…love.” It was as satisfactory a letter as he had ever received from a woman.

"All right,” said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.

…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood.

From ancient drains and sewers of the language (maritime inns and brothels…), from scrawls in the catacombs…whoremasters’ chapbooks…the vocabulary of tavern brawls.

…no European whore’s mock-respectability.

…the sin of gluttony, also the sin of lecherous intent toward an honourable and high-placed matron….But more sin is to come, and that sin a double one, namely of lechery in act, perhaps venial in the young but by no means to be condoned, and of adultery, which Saint John saith shall be punished by fire for the act and brimstone for the stink of the ordure of the partners in that sin….She is but a heathen….With the instinct of her kind she knoweth the best and most secret places for lechery….thou are bent on sin, the act of darkness….On her breath is no honey but the smell of strong drink, the potent mingling of barley and juniper in deadly ferment….One man is from the Antipodes but, contrary to the superstition of the vulgar, he is like other men….It is he who seeth the cabin where thy lust worketh itself out, he remembereth lewd advice of the charioteer of Cathay….approacheth on tiptoe the sound of beastly gratification….Lust croucheth now above in the rooftree, his wings fearfully foldeth….But in his rage he spareth not her, calling her Jezebel and harlot….

Head of the Faithful, Head of the Infidel…

…the inevitable colonial philistinism.

Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.

…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)

…workmen who wanted (a) the white man out…,(c) sinecures

“…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…”

…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.

“…My name…is Mahalingam….is Sanskrit for ‘large or great or mighty generative organ’ - this, of course, having more a religious (through associations of religion and fertility) significance than an anatomical one. Though anatomically and…socially the name has not proved inept.