The collection / 9 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

02Undated

Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow, childish pleasures.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

03Undated

Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

04Undated

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

05Undated

He never sat an examination in economics: his knowledge came from pondering problems and discussing them as much as from book-learning.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

06Undated

The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

07Undated

At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

08Undated

Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words – sweetness and light.’ Bell argued that ‘as a means to good and as a means to civility a leisured class is essential’. The Bloomsbury group was necessary because ‘It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote

09Undated

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.

Richard Davenport-Hines / quote