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Twenty-five seems to me the latest age at which anybody should write an autobiography. It has an air of finality about it, as though one had clambered to the summit of a great h...

Had one been a Prime Minister there would be every reason for talking of one’s first tooth and devoting a chapter or two to its effect upon the history of our times. There would...

If you wish to sip the very essence of democracy, you must pay a visit to the White House and talk with the President of the United States. The more urgent your business, the mo...

I noticed more and more in America that vulgarity (which one finds, of course, all over the world, even in the South Sea Islands), seemed to be in inverse ratio to wealth. The p...

In January, 1919, I went to Oxford. That seems about the shortest way of relating a fact that is of singularly little interest to anybody but myself. What _is_ of interest is th...

Among the questions which will present themselves to the future literary historian, none will be more difficult to answer than ‘Was Mr. G. K. Chesterton afraid of his wife?’ The...

Oxford at this time was a ferment of political activity. It was full of young ex-soldiers, who considered, with pardonable presumption, that having endured Hell for five years,...

You may, or you may not, have heard of the Oxford Union Society. It has a habit of producing future Prime Ministers. Among its past presidents it numbers such illustrious names...

So far the feminine element has not obtruded greatly into these pages, not for lack of females, but for lack of distinguished ones. It is a matter of little significance to the...

You may have seen, two Christmases ago, a sensational article in the _Weekly Dispatch_, by one Lord St. Audries, telling of a ghostly midnight adventure which he had experienced...

It was not easy, in the unrest and turmoil of the year 1921, for any young man to settle down to a definite occupation. There was a great outpouring from Oxford in that year, ma...

On the next day I was summoned to the Queen. I must here admit, with due shame and contrition, that I had never been to see a Queen before. I really don’t know why. Still, the f...

It was then a little after four, and the hectic, unnatural pageant of Athenian Society was drifting by in full swing. Look well at that pageant, for Athens, in this January of 1...

Those little Balkan Courts were terribly pathetic. They always gave me the impression of a rather threadbare musical comedy on tour. There was so much pomp, such a glitter of un...

And now, on returning to London, I decided that it was time to ‘become a journalist.’ So many hundreds of otherwise sane young men have made the same decision, without success,...

I have always been puzzled by the universal tendency of democratic communities to attach the most revolting vices to those whom they have chosen to govern them. It is considered...

In February, 1923, I attended the famous trial of Edith Thompson and Fred Bywaters, which created a sensation in England keener than any which had been felt since the Crippen case.

Quite the most amusing person I met at about this time was H. L. Mencken, whose books _Prejudices_ so perfectly describe the particular standpoint in art which he has adopted. W...

I now retired to a nursing home for an operation. The operation had nothing to do with my visit to Valentino, for it was only ‘tonsils’--and I spent my few days of rest in readi...

Rudyard Kipling is a fine example of a great man who will forgive almost everything to Youth. He certainly forgave me as charmingly as it was possible to do so.

I ought, if I had a tidy mind, to describe how I got to the Australian Bush, and how so divine a person as Melba should be singing to me at all. But that can come in due course....

It is a matter of very small importance either to Seymour Hicks or to anybody else that I regard him as capable of the finest acting on our stage. It merely gives a keynote to w...

All young men love paying pilgrimages, especially when the pilgrimage is to some rather exotic and remote hermit who happens to be in the vogue. Incidentally, I am quite convinc...

A little while ago Mr. Philip Guedalla (that squib who never stops fizzing) annoyed me very much by making rude remarks about dramatic critics. He said that they looked like wai...

William Somerset Maugham has no public personality. Although _Lady Frederick_ has been prancing about the stages of the world for nearly twenty years--dear thing--although the ‘...

In 1870, had you chanced to be walking over one of the rough and alarming roads that stretched across the Balkans, from Roustchouk to Constantinople, you might have met a young...

I should like to draw Noel Coward rather than to talk about him--to take up my pen and trace, with infinite subtlety, the rather bumpy forehead, the keen nose, the darting eyes-...

And thus, abruptly, I end. A line drawn, a cigarette thrown out of an open window, a pile of manuscript pushed into the corner of one’s desk, waiting to be sent to the typist.