Esher Quotes

Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be.

Our Father which art in Hendon Harrow be thy name Thy Kingston come, Thy Wimbledon, In Erith as it is in Hendon. Give us this day our Leatherhead And forgive us our bypasses As we forgive those who bypass against us. Lead us not into Thames Ditton But deliver us from Ewell For thine is the Kingston, the Purley and Crawley For Esher and Esher, Crouch End.791

When politicians and civil servants hear the word culture they feel for their blue pencils.

The monarchy, as Lord Esher, adviser to Edward VII and editor of Queen Victoria’s early letters and journals, would later say, was exchanging ‘authority’ for ‘influence’.3

…metaphor have something in common with, for example, the paintings of M.C.Esher, or the Rorshach blot, both of which are famously indecipherable or, at least, irreducible to a single interpretation: they can never fully reveal their own meanings because they are perennially on the point of turning into their other.

(five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handclaps

Obituarists kept circling his all-conquering charm. It was, Lord Esher considered, ‘invincible. The individual man succumbed to it, and the multitude went down before it. When the King walked into a room everyone felt the glow of a personal greeting. When he smiled upon a vast assemblage everyone replied unconsciously.’9 Edward may have lived his life at the apex of an intensely hierarchical society, but he had possessed what Lord Fisher (the former First Sea Lord who had been raised to the peerage at the close of 1909) called an ‘astounding aptitude of appealing to the hearts of both High and Low’.10 To every domestic servant, he had expressed his appreciation. To every beggar, he had tipped his hat. G. K. Chesterton described the King ‘as a kind of universal uncle. His popularity in poor families was so frank as to be undignified; he was really spoken of by tinkers and tailors as if he were some gay and prosperous member of their own family. There was a picture of him upon the popular retina infinitely brighter and brisker than there is either of Mr Asquith or Mr Balfour.

Edward’s final meeting with his mistress was as harrowing as that with his banker was dignified. Even before the news was broken to the nation, the atmosphere surrounding Mrs Keppel was fraught. From her nursery window, nine-year-old Sonia could see knots of people clustered on the pavements, and strangers buttonholing each other for the latest. Inside, the servants were distracted and grim. Fifteen-year-old Violet was clearly in on the secret but refused to divulge any details. That afternoon, Mrs Keppel presented a letter to the Queen, which Edward had written to her almost a decade earlier. In the event he was ever taken seriously ill, he asked her to come and see him ‘so that I may say farewell and thank you for all your kindness and friendship since it has been my good fortune to know you’. He concluded with a thinly veiled order to his wife and children: ‘I feel convinced that all those who have any affection for me will carry out the wishes which I expressed in these lines.’37 Always magnanimous to her husband’s lovers, Alexandra invited Mrs Keppel to the Palace at 5 p.m. By then, the King was being kept alive with strychnine. At 1 p.m., he had had a heart attack and was believed to be dead. Coming round, he had drifted in and out of consciousness for several hours. At 4.30 p.m., the Prince of Wales informed him that his horse, Witch of the Air, had just won by half a length at Kempton Park. ‘I am very glad,’ Edward murmured.38 When Mrs Keppel arrived, he barely recognised her. According to Lord Esher, who heard a full account from Francis Knollys, the Queen shook hands and told her, ‘I am sure you have always had a good influence over him.