A London MosaicW. Collins, 1921 - 133 pages |
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actors artistic audience Bayswater Bellomo's brick Brixton Brixton Road Café Royal Carlyle's house Charlie Chaplin Chelsea cinema civilisation clean colour comfortable creature Cromwell Road crowd curtains drink E. V. Lucas Ella Shields English eyes feel fern-seller flappers flowers foreign garden George Robey Georgian girl glass goes green grew hall Joseph Lyons Lane less Lewis Waller live London look lunch Marie Lloyd mean meat music-hall never Nevinson night nowadays once Oswald Stoll painting perhaps play pleasant pleasures poor public-houses Puritan realise remember restaurant rich round Savoy shops sing Soho sold ice-cream song sort spirit Square stew Strand Corner House strange Street suburbs suppose Tartarin Quixote Tartarin Sancho taste theatre thing to-day told true understand Verrey's vice Victorian period Widegate woman women wonder Wyndham Lewis young
Popular passages
Page 101 - Augustus at Rome was for building renown'd, And of marble he left what of brick he had found ; But is not our Nash, too, a very great master ? He finds us all brick, and he leaves us all plaster.
Page 88 - Your Malloring is called with a cup of tea, at, say, seven o'clock, out of a nice, clean, warm bed; he gets into a bath that has been got ready for him; into clothes and boots that have been brushed for him; and goes down to a room where there's a fire burning already if it's a cold day, writes a few letters, perhaps, before eating a breakfast of exactly what he likes, nicely prepared for him, and reading the newspaper that best comforts his soul; when he has eaten and read, he lights his cigar or...
Page 89 - ... he passes the whole day except that for two or three hours, sometimes indeed seven or eight hours, he attends to his physique by riding, motoring, playing a game or indulging in a sport that he has chosen for himself. And, at the end of all that, he probably has another bath that has been made ready for him, goes down to a good dinner that has been cooked for him, smokes, reads, learns and inwardly digests, or else plays cards, billiards and acts host till he is sleepy, and so to bed in a clean,...
Page 89 - Your slum-dweller, at the end of his day, hangs from a strap in a car packed to suffocation, makes his dreary way from the crowded car past the garbage cans and refuse of the crowded street into the friction and discontent of his crowded home — to a wife discouraged by endless effort in a hopeless...
Page 132 - Jcnow them that I now prefer to exhibit my work to the largest possible general public. I have no illusions about the public for, owing chiefly to our Press, our loathsome tradition-loving Public Schools and our antiquity-stinking Universities, the average Englishman is not merely suspicious of the new in all intellectual and artistic experiment, but he is mentally trained to be so unsportsman-like as to try to kill every new endeavour in embryo, especially if it shows signs of developing a future...
Page 88 - ... six or seven in the morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops for an hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether have chosen to eat if he could have had his will. He goes home to a tea that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without assistance, smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes out again to work for his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of beer and 'baccy.
Page 66 - It does not matter that some may have had their parts only five years, perhaps only five months. They are enveloped in the mother-liquor of this mature, well-aged performance. You recall the stew that Anatole France described: "To be good it must have been cooking lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence's stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pot sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious...
Page 23 - You can't drowse in a music-hall: from the moment when the conductor, in his elaborately luxurious and irremediably faulty dress suit, addresses his first and infinitely disabused bow to the audience, to the time when he calls upon the band to produce the smallest possible scrap of ' God Save the King,' and hurries out loyalty on the wings of ragtime, there is no flagging.
Page 23 - American dancer, or sketch got up regardless, tread upon each other's heels; the main thing is the band, the harsh, rapid band, that never stops, that plays anything, providing it is the thing of the day, with all the regularity and indifference of the typewriter. From it gush patriotism, comedy or sentiment, and all three burst forth with their full headline value. There is no...
Page 25 - ome ' . . . ' Take me back to mother.' . . . Opponents reply as loudly: 'Shut up! chuck him out!' But the voices resume in more and more sepulchral tones: