[45] The phrase is borrowed from Mr. Asquith.
[46] One of the last words, in a long list beginning with "Armageddon," to hypnotize the newspaper-reader.
[47] One evening I entered Covent Garden after the curtain had risen. "M. Kerenski?" enquired the sole occupant of the box, peering at me through the gloom. "I beg your pardon! I see that he landed in England this afternoon."
[48] At the risk of a prophecy I would suggest that Masefield's Gallipoli has a lasting place in the treasury of great English prose, so long, at least, as our present canons of perfection in prose-style are maintained.
[49] I am not limiting myself strictly to those war-books which had been published by the date of the armistice.
[50] "Honestly, I do not care about the clever people," confessed 'Lady Maybury'. "I find them borné, self-centred, touchy, and embarrassing. They have no conversation, and they always ask me if I was at Ranelagh last Saturday. Have you ever observed that?"
[51] At Oxford I first heard the couplet which tells how
"From out their different tubs
Stubbs butters Freeman,
Freeman butters Stubbs,"
it was quoted by one member of a prolific triumvirate which then filled a considerable proportion of the critical journals. In those days it was hardly possible to read an article by A which did not contain a panegyric of B's latest book; it was no less difficult to read B's book without meeting a reference to what had been "most justly observed by C."
[52] The volume of hostile reviews, surely too great to be spontaneous and independent, which greeted The Autobiography of Margot Asquith, was only less remarkable than the success which the book achieved in spite of them.