Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Her husband, like many other human beings, was divided between the love of life and the love of death. His love of life made him love Elizabeth. His love of death made him love his abominable mother, and give her an authority over Elizabeth which she horribly misused.

Thereafter they founded violent and magnificent kingdoms of infinite promise in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia, but these were overthrown when the Turks invaded Europe in the fourteenth century, and all were enslaved except the Slavs on the western borders of the Peninsula.

The Slavs were a people, quarrelsome, courageous, artistic, intellectual, and profoundly perplexing to all other peoples, who came from Asia into the Balkan Peninsula early in the Christian era and were Christianized by Byzantine influence

see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature

Her question made me remember that the word ‘idiot’ comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they

and they respect the truth. It is not always so when they deal with India or Burma; but that is not their fault, it is the fault of Empire, which makes a man own things outside his power to control

But they are on the side of life, they love justice, they hate violence

they lack readiness to sacrifice their individual rights for the corporate good, they do not bid the right welcome to the other man’s soul

It is possible that we have betrayed life and love for more than five hundred years on a field wider than Kosovo, as wide as Europe.

And again we encounter her preference, at least on first meeting, for anything that is raw and elemental over anything that is tame or domesticated