This next bit is wholly unrelated to Mrs Shrimpton, whose biography otherwise occupies my every waking hour, but since Other People wrote these things I am nearly certain she will not deduct anything from my salary.

"She must have been, no doubt, a docile, good-natured child, with a certain facility for Latin verbs and intelligence tests -- but what use is that to anyone?"

"Julius Caesar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year (54 BC, not 56, owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting), and having defeated the Ancient Britons by unfair means, such as battering-rams, tortoises, hippocausts, centipedes, axes and bundles, set the memorable Latin sentence, `Veni, Vidi, Vici,' which the Romans, who were all very well educated, construed correctly.

"The Britons, however, who of course still used the old pronunciation, understanding him to have called them `Weeny, Weedy and Weaky', lost heart and gave up the struggle, thinking that he had already divided them All into Three Parts."

"Even when I seem to be doing pretty well in Spanish, I can run out of it, the way someone might run out of flour or eggs. A few years after I passed up the chance to stay in Madrid, some friends and I went to Baja California to mark an occasion I can no longer remember, and I became the group's spokesman to the owner of the motel, a Mrs. Gonzales, who spoke no English. Toward the end of a very long evening, as I listened to her complain about some excess of celebration on our part, I suddenly realized that I had run out of Spanish. It wasn't merely that I couldn't think of the Spanish words for what I wanted to say ("I am mortified, Mrs. Gonzales, to learn that someone in our group might have behaved in a manner so inappropriate, not to say disgusting"). I couldn't think of any Spanish words at all. Desperately rummaging around in the small bin of Spanish in my mind, I could come up with nothing but the title of a Calderon play I had once read, to no lasting effect, in a Spanish literature course.

"`Mrs. Gonzales,' I said. `Life is a dream.'

"She looked impressed and, I must say, surprised. She told me that I had said something really quite profound. I shrugged. It seemed the appropriately modest response; even if it hadn't been, it would have been all I could do until I managed to borrow a cup of Spanish from a neighbour. Eventually I came to look back on the experience as just about the only time I was truly impressive in a foreign language."

"`I think German is the worst,' said Mrs Brandon, `not that I know any Latin. It is really nothing but words. If you try to read a German book you spend all your time looking up words, and there doesn't seem to be any special reason for them to mean anything and the minute you have looked them up you forget what they mean. And they all begin with a prefix or a suffix.'"

"Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing."

"Nor can I do better, in conclusion, than impress upon you the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument."

"Finnish is nice too."

Straying even farther from the point.

There is another and a better world.