Mark Twain never said or wrote many of the quotations ascribed to him, but this one is kosher. It's the epigraph to chapter 2 of his The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson:
Adam was but human – this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Sam Bright on the right-wingers who claim to love Britain, but want to destroy all its institutions: "The whole of Britain has become one big Oxford restaurant after a Bullingdon Club dinner: the tables upturned, the glass smashed, the staff left to sweep up the mess while the lads stumble out laughing, having dumped a bag of cash on the table by way of compensation."
Colin Thurbron gave the eulogy for the writer Gillian Tindall at her memorial gathering last week: "'Houses and barns,' she wrote, 'gate posts, hedgerows, field slopes and the lie of paths, persist and persist, even when people that created them are earth themselves'. In effect cities and buildings become, in her work, a palimpsest, in which the past lingers beneath the surface of things, and continues to shape them."
"Twain eventually came to believe that his idyllic childhood in Hannibal – immortalised in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – had been only a dream, from which he had awakened to inescapable loss and misery. The boom and bust so redolent of American life haunted Twain, as it would F Scott Fitzgerald." Edward Short reviews a new biography of Mark Twain.
