The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

Sir Thomas Browne gave his son an admirable piece of literary advice. The young son had been travelling in Hungary and proposed to write an account of what he had seen. His fath...

Even the success chronicled in the preceding chapter did not exhaust the store of good luck destined for my first appearance as a political leader-writer. Fate again showed its...

The autobiographer, or at any rate the writer of the type of autobiography on which I am engaged, need not apologise for being egotistical. If he is not that he is nothing. He m...

I delay too long the picture of my father. Perhaps unconsciously I have been trying to avoid describing him, for I know the difficulty of the task and dread producing something...

Delightful as were my father's literary and historical stories and observations, already described, I liked them best when they dealt with our own family and its traditions. My...

There were naturally certain nursery traditions about me of the magnifying kind, but, taken as a whole, I don't think I can claim to have been anything but a normal child, with...

It must not be supposed that either my childhood or boyhood was a psychic or poetic affair, or that in any way I was a cranky and abnormal child. I was nothing of the kind. In s...

In the families of the well-to-do few influences have a greater effect upon the child, and so upon the man, than that exercised by the servants of the household in which he or s...

taught herself by pure force of her will, adopting, curiously enough, what would now be described as the Montessori method. She opened books and read them somehow or other till...

If I am to be exact, this chapter should have the sub-title of "Poetry and Metre," for poetry, other people's and my own, and an impassioned study of the metrical art, were the...

My introduction to Oxford and its life was somewhat chaotic. Out of that chaos, as I shall show later, I achieved both good and evil. But I must first explain how the chaos aros...

Though I made such a hash of classical studies and was apparently so impermeable to Latin and Greek literature, I am not one of those people who are prepared to damn the Greek a...

Though it is the rule of these memoirs not to deal at any length or detail with living people, I feel I must make an exception in regard to Sir Bernard Mallet, the first friend...

Even at the risk of making my autobiography open to accusation that it is a kind of Strachey Anthology, I should be giving a false impression of myself and my life at Oxford if...

Before I come to the period when I became, not only Editor, but Proprietor, of _The Spectator_, I must give an account of some of my experiences with other newspapers. My first...

My editorship of the _Cornhill_, to which I always look back with great pleasure, came as a complete surprise to me. Among the many new friends my marriage brought me was Mr. Ge...

Taking _The Spectator_ as the pivot of my life, I began this book by a plunge _in medias res_. This done, I had to go back and tell of my rearing and of my life in something app...

Though I cannot resist writing upon the picturesque side of Townsend's character, I must take care not to give a wrong impression. Nobody must think, because of Townsend's empha...

I have described how I came to London, how I became established at _The Spectator_ Office, and what, before I succeeded to the Editorship of _The Spectator_, were my various _ex...

I am afraid that throughout these memoirs I have talked too much about the volumes which I might fill, but am not filling. Yet I must do so once more in this chapter. My mother-...

To begin with, you must never try to remember the actual words that you hear Thiers, or Guizot, or Lord Aberdeen, or Mr. Bright, or whoever else it may be, use. If you begin to...

When I became not only sole Proprietor of _The Spectator_ but also Editor-in-Chief, Chief Leader-writer, and Chief Reviewer, it was natural that I should confront myself with th...

The watch-dog's function by no means exhausts the work of the journalist. There remains that strange function which is not yet quite realised or understood in a modern community...

The war is too near, too great, and also too much an object from which people turn in weariness and impatience to be dealt with by me, except very lightly. In spite then of the...

People are getting tired of military controversies, and if they were not, I should be precluded from dealing with them by the fact that I intend to avoid as far as possible matt...

There are five men,--three of them close friends and the others good friends and men for whom I felt a warm admiration,--who stand out as prominent influences in my life. In the...

It was at one of Mr. Chamberlain's house-parties that I first met one of the five distinguished men who made a deep impression on my mind and so on my life. That man was Colonel...

Though I have been engaged in politics all my life, I have deliberately left my political views, aspirations, and actions to almost the last chapter in my autobiography. That wi...

I have described how the policy of Home Rule adopted by the Liberal Party made me, as it did so many other people in the United Kingdom, first a Liberal-Unionist and then a Unio...

The writing of memoirs is a pleasant exercise. At any rate, I have found it so. It has led me back to many curious and delightful things which I had wholly forgotten. They came...