The Puppet Show of Memory

When people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with regret, “If only I had kept a diary, what a rich store of material I should now have at my disposal!” I remem...

Life was divided between London from January to August, then Devonshire till after Christmas. In the nursery and the early part of the schoolroom period we used to go to Coombe...

To mention any of the other people of the outside world at once brings me to Membland, because the outside world was intimately connected with that place. Membland was a large,...

In the summer holidays of 1883 Mr. Warre came to stay with us. John, Cecil, and Everard were at his house at Eton. Cecil was to read with him during the holidays. Cecil was far...

I went to school in September 1884. On the 7th of September John came of age, and we had a large party in the house and a banquet for the tenants in the tennis court, at which I...

I enjoyed Eton from the first moment I arrived. The surprise and the relief at finding one was treated like a grown-up person, that nobody minded if one had a sister called Susa...

I spent the Christmas holidays, after leaving Eton, at Membland. I had had another little book of poems printed privately as a Christmas present for my mother, and I was still m...

After Christmas I stayed a few days with Chérie at her house at Cosham and with the Ponsonbys at the Isle of Wight. Uncle Henry Ponsonby said he had taken one book with him in t...

The time soon came when I had to go up for my first examination, and before it there was a period of intensive cramming. I had scores of teachers, and spent hour after hour taki...

could have sent a German essay of mine to a German magazine. But not knowing the German for “belligerent,” I was beaten by others who knew the language less well. The same appli...

I had rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the Chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir Edmund Monson; the Councillor, Mich...

I arrived at Copenhagen in August. I went there direct from Paris and crossed whatever intervening seas lie between Denmark and Germany _via_ Hamburg and Kiel. I had been given...

“Les Comédiens,” said Jules Lemaître, “tiennent beaucoup de place dans nos conversations et dans nos journaux parce qu’ils en tiennent beaucoup dans nos plaisirs.” Amongst all t...

I arrived in Rome, after staying a few days on the way in London and in Florence. In the Drury Lane Pantomime that year, I think it was _Mother Goose_, Dan Leno played a harp so...

When I arrived at St. Petersburg, the situation was regarded as grave, but people still did not believe in war. Sir Charles Scott, our Ambassador, had just left, or was just lea...

We established ourselves in a small village about two miles from the town of Liaoyang. Everything was calm. This was on 29th August, and a battle was expected on the next day. K...

During the summer of 1905 I did a certain amount of dramatic criticism for the _Morning Post_. I wrote notices on some of the foreign plays that were being given in London durin...

I spent all the winter of 1905-6 at Moscow with occasional visits to St. Petersburg and to the country. The strikes were over, but it was in a seething, restless state. Count Wi...

In October 1906 I took up my duties as correspondent to the _Morning Post_ at St. Petersburg. I took an apartment on the ground floor of a little street running out of the Bolsh...

After Christmas, the second Duma was convened and opened. Its doings were not interesting. It was not a representative body, as the elections had been carefully arranged; still...

In the autumn of 1907 I went for the first time to South Russia. To Kharkov, and then to Gievko, a small village in the neighbourhood, where I stayed with Prince Mirski in his c...

I arrived at Constantinople in May 1909, on the same day that the Sultan Abdul Hamid left the city. A revolution had just occurred. The Young Turk party had dethroned the Sultan...

“On arrive novice à toutes les guerres,” wrote the French philosopher; or if he did not, he said something like it. I have never known a place where being on the spot made so sh...

As soon as I got back to Sofia I found that there would be nothing of interest for me to do or see there, and no chance of getting to the Bulgarian front. I might perhaps have g...

From 1912 until the summer of 1914 I spent the greater part of the year in Russia. I was no longer doing journalistic work, but I was still writing books on Russian life and lit...