How To Be A Brit Quotes

She hadn't realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

She'd already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn't yet learned how to navigate the difference.

An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in an outside way you couldn’t hide.

She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

This had always frightened her about marriage: how satisfied married people seemed, how unable they were to ask for more. She couldn’t imagine feeling satisfied.

She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.

You do know him, so that's a lame excuse." It was a lame excuse, but it was the best I had. "How do you really ever truly know someone?" Brit smacked her hands to her cheeks and she shook her head. "He's not a serial killer." "Speaking of serial killers, everyone thought Ted Bundy was a really charming, handsome man. And look how he turned out. Psycho." Jacob stared at me. "He's not Ted Bundy.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren't.

Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. -Annie Dillard

The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them.

An inside hurt was supposed to stay inside. How strange it must be to hurt in a way that you couldn't hide.

You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.

The past may or may not be a foreign country. It may morph or lie still, but its capital is always Regret, and what flushes through it is the grand canal of unfledged desires that feed into an archipelago of tiny might-have-beens that never really happened but aren't unreal for not happening and might still happen though we fear they never will. And I thought of Ole Brit holding back so much, as we all do when we look back to see that the roads we've left behind or not taken have all but vanished. Regret is how we hope to back into our real lives once we find the will, the blind drive and courage, to trade in the life we're given for the life that bears our name and ours only. Regret is how we look forward to things we've long lost yet never really had. Regret is hope without conviction, I said. We're torn between regret, which is the price to pay for things not done, and remorse, which is the cost for having done them. Between one and the other, time plays all its cozy little tricks.

In England it is bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently. It may be your own personal view that two and two make four, but you must not state it in a self-assured way, because this is a democratic country and others may be of a different opinion.

On the Continent learned persons love to quote Aristotle, Horace, Montaigne and show off their knowledge; in England only uneducated people show off their knowledge, nobody quotes Latin and Greek authors in the course of a conversation, unless he has never read them.

While all this goes on, the English remain staunch believers in equality. Equality is a notion the English have given to humanity. Equality means that you are just as good as the next man but the next man is not half as good as you are.

She'd always talk about how great Gandhi was. I'd tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he'd of been dead in a second, his name forgotten.

...how a familiar room slowly changes colour as morning arrives.

Overstatement, too, plays a considerable part in English social life. This takes mostly the form of someone remarking: ‘I say…’ and then keeping silent for three days on end.

Q. Why don’t they work harder? A. They just don’t like hard work. The Germans have a reputation for hard work, so they like to keep it up. The British find it boring.

THE British are brave people. They can face anything, except reality.

5. Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still really young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school. 6. Television puts a stop to crime because all the burglars and robbers, instead of going to burgle and rob, sit at home watching The Lone Ranger, Emergency Ward Ten and Dotto.

Willie Lee heard that the white men were angry that Leon stole their business by underbidding them. But how could you shoot a man for accepting less than what you asked for? “White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little.” Willie Lee shook his head, packing tobacco into his pipe. “You gotta follow they rules but they change ’em when they feel. Devilish, you ask me.

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into. -Sylvia Plath

In Socorro, he began wrapping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, shoulders square. He told himself that it was safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

There are some occasions when you must not refuse a cup of tea, otherwise you are judged an exotic and barbarous bird without any hope of ever being able to take your place in civilised society. If you are invited to an English home, at five o’clock in the morning you get a cup of tea. It is either brought in by a heartily smiling hostess or an almost malevolently silent maid.

Although home still represents stability in an unstable world, we're beginning to see that home can be how we live, a situation that we create and recreate. Home is less attached to bricks and mortar and more about the lives we lead, the ways that we connect with each other, the communities we build. Home is a state of mind, something we make for ourselves wherever we can. Hygge is the home we make in the flux and flow of our lives.

If a continental youth wants to declare his love to a girl, he kneels down, tells her that she is the sweetest, the most charming and ravishing person in the world, that she has something in her, something peculiar and individual which only a few hundred thousand other women have and that he would be unable to live one more minute without her. Often, to give a little more emphasis to the statement, he shoots himself on the spot. This is a normal, week-day declaration of love in the more temperamental continental countries. In England the boy pats his adored one on the back and says softly: ‘I don’t object to you, you know.’ If he is quite mad with passion, he may add: ‘I rather fancy you, in fact.

When we hygger, we frame the moment, give it our full attention, savour and hold it, in an awareness that the moment will pass. We feel how one moment becomes layered on to the next; past and present mingled together - everything falling into place, into one accord.

she too understood loss, how it drove you to imagine every possible scenario that might have prevented it.

Now they were slow and deliberate, the way hurt people loved, stretching carefully just to see how far their damaged muscles could go.

Not all at once, but slowly, her memories disintegrating. Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.

He’d made her feel like love was something she had to claw her way into, but look at how easily he loved Aubrey. Well, of course he did. Aubrey was easy to love.

For a second, Stella wondered if she’d realized her secret. She almost wished Loretta had. It scared her, how badly she wanted to belong to somebody.

The twins used to love hiding behind the quilts and sheets before Desiree realized how humiliating it was, your home always filled with strangers’ dirty things.

Nobody had warned her of this as a girl, when they carried on over her beautiful light complexion. How easily her skin would wear the mark of an angry man.

Nobody had warned her of this as a girl, when they carried on over her beautiful light complexion - how easily her skin would wear the mark of an angry man.

have twins. But you got just the one. And this here, this is your love line. See how it goes deep and straight? That means you’ll be married a long

He led Stella to his car. He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn't it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.

Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.

slipped out for a smoke. She was thinking, leaving the dingy theater, about how she could make things right. She could take Kennedy to dinner after the show, apologize for not attending sooner. Suggest that she take more

Tequila, anyone?” he asked our group, but his eyes were on me. “Hell, yeah, K, break it out,” Blake said. I tried to take a step back, but I couldn't go far. Kaidan poured the drinks, handing one to each twin and Blake. “Jay?” he asked. “Nah, dude. I gotta drive.” “Kope? Anna?” We both stared at him, not answering. “Oh, that's right, I nearly forgot,” Kaidan said with smooth indifference. “The prince and princess would never stoop so low. Well, bottoms up to us peasants.” What was up with that? The group shared a round of uneasy glances. Jay's mouth was set in firm disapproval as he stared at Kaidan, who wouldn't meet Jay's eye. The four of them raised their glasses, taking the shots and chasing them with bites of lime. I got a strong whiff of the pungent, salty tequila and gripped the counter with one hand. “How's your soda, princess?” Though Kaidan spoke with a calm air, there was underlying menace that pained me to hear. “You don't need to be so hateful,” I whispered. “If you ask me, I'd say the princess prefers a dark knight.” Ginger smirked and took a long drink of her beer. “She only thinks she does,” Kaidan said to her. I opened and closed my hands at my sides. After all we'd been through, how could he stand there and have the audacity to throw temptations in my face and insult me? I wanted to say something to shut him up, but the more flustered I got, the more tongue-tied I became. “Anna?” Jay asked. “You ready to bounce?” There was no way Jay was ready to leave. “No! Don't go yet,” Marna begged. She yanked the front of Kaidan's shirt. “You're scaring everyone off, Kai! If you can't be nice, then don't get so pissed.” “She means drunk,” Blake said to me in a stage whisper; then he added, “Brits,” with a roll of his eyes. Blake's attempt at comic relief didn't lighten the mood much. “My apologies,” Kaidan said to Marna. He slid the bottle away with the back of his hand, and Marna patted down the bit of shirt she'd crumpled. I stared at Kaidan, but he wouldn't meet my eye.

For years, home has been idealised as a refuge from the world, somewhere predictable and unchanging. But home isn't just where we go to escape the world. Home is how we inhabit the world. Meaning comes from connection and a willingness to pay attention to the particulars of our lives, from the things we choose to use to our daily rituals and shared activities.

This was how Desiree thought of herself then: the single dynamic force in Stella’s life, a gust of wind strong enough to rip out her roots. This was the story Desiree needed to tell herself and Stella allowed her to. They both felt safe inside it.

She glanced toward the dark woods and nodded. He led Stella to his car. He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn't it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.

Some hoped, watching Desiree hold the hand of the little dark girl, that the two wouldn't even stay that long. They weren't used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them. Each time that girl passed by, no hat or nothing, they were as galled as when Thomas Richard returned from the war, half a leg lighter, and walked around town with one pant leg pinned back so that everyone could see his loss. If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.

The worst kind of soul is the great Slav soul. People who suffer from it are usually very deep thinkers. They may say things like this: ‘Sometimes I am so merry and sometimes I am so sad. Can you explain why?’ (You cannot, do not try.) Or they may say: ‘I am so mysterious.... I sometimes wish I were somewhere else than where I am.’ (Do not say: ‘I wish you were.’) Or ‘When I am alone in a forest at night-time and jump from one tree to another, I often think that life is so strange.

After that night, she never tried to search for the town again. It would be something that she would always know she was right about but could never prove, like people who swore they’d seen Elvis wandering around the grocery store, knocking on the melons. Unlike those loons, she wouldn’t tell anyone. A private crazy—she was okay with that. Until she met Jude Winston. That night, at the cast party, Jude spoke the word Mallard and it sounded like a song Kennedy hadn’t heard in years. Ah, that’s how it goes.

BY HIGH SCHOOL, the names no longer shocked her but the loneliness did. You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it. She sat by herself at lunch, flipping through cheap paperbacks. She never received visits on the weekends, or invitations to Lou’s for lunch, or phone calls just to see how she was doing. After school, she went running alone. She was the fastest girl on the track team, and on another team in another town, she might have been captain. But on this team in this town, she stretched alone before practice and sat by herself on the team bus, and after she won the gold medal at the state championship, no one congratulated her but Coach Weaver.

it scared her, how you could return home in a different body, how something big could be happening inside you and no one even knew it.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body.

I’m an addict, Astraea. I don’t know how to do anything small. I feel intensely. I want intensely. I crave intensely. For me, if it’s not a healthy obsession, it’s not love.

Isn’t that how all the best love stories play out? It’s not love if it doesn’t hurt first.

how small she’d looked next to the size of her wanting. “You

Harry could feel his earlobes getting hot. How could this gay clown make him, a fully grown man, so embarrassed that he looked like a Brit after six hours on a Spanish beach?

It is so much nicer to ask, when someone speaks of Barbados, Banska Bystrica or Fiji: ‘Oh those little islands.... Are they British?’ (They usually are.)

IT is easy to be rude on the Continent. You just shout and call people names of a zoological character.

Was this who counted for colored in America, who whites wanted to keep separate? Well, how could they ever tell the difference?

He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.

Even after eight years of marriage, Stella still felt a little squeamish when people asked how they’d met. A boss, his secretary, a tale as old as time.

By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

You’d be amazed by how loud the city sounded when you’d decided to be quiet.

And that’s how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.

How she felt that you could flick away history like shrugging a hand off your shoulder.

What’s there to believe? I told you how I feel.” “Negroes always love our hometowns,” he said. “Even though we’re always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.

Then you have tea for breakfast; then you have tea at eleven o’clock in the morning; then after lunch; then you have tea for tea; then after supper; and again at eleven o’clock at night. You must not refuse any additional cups of tea under the following circumstances: if it is hot; if it is cold; if you are tired; if anybody thinks that you might be tired; if you are nervous; if you are gay; before you go out; if you are out; if you have just returned home; if you feel like it; if you do not feel like it; if you have had no tea for some time; if you have just had a cup.

After the twins were born, Adele never built an altar. But later, after her girls disappeared, she wondered if she’d been arrogant. Maybe she should have just built the altar, no matter how foolish it sounded.

The drugs bothered Stella less than the indiscretion. Only a lazy girl would get caught, and her daughter was clever but lazy, blissfully unaware of how hard her mother worked to maintain the lie that was her life.

The brits made a career out of oppressing people, they made a lifestyle out of oppressing people, but oppression itself is not a british thing - the Brits did it, the Nazis did it, the Brahmins did it, and today the neonazis do it.

Racism in the UK takes a different form than it does in the United States, but there is no mistaking its existence and how engrained it is. A major theme of racism in the UK centers on the question of who is authentically “British.” It can come through in subtle acts of bias, micro-aggressions such as the Palace staffer who told the biracial co-author of this book, “I never expected you to speak the way you do,” or the Daily Mail headline, “Memo to Meghan: We Brits Prefer True Royalty to Fashion Royalty.” While their columnist was criticizing Meghan for her Vogue editorials, there was another way to read it, and that was that to be British meant to be born and bred in the UK—and be white.

At first, passing seemed so simple, she couldn’t understand why her parents hadn’t done it. But she was young then. She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.

Later, Kennedy would realize how often her mother used money to avoid discussing her past, as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything: why her mother owned no family photographs, why no friends from high school ever called, why they’d never been invited to a single wedding or funeral or reunion. ‘We were poor,’ her mother would snap if she asked too many questions, that poverty spreading to every aspect of her life. Her whole past, a barren pantry shelf.

Hygge is a practice related to how we create and preserve meaning in the places we inhabit, how we make homes that comfort us and bring us together. ...then we begin to really inhabit a place or a moment in time and open ourselves to what it has to give.

She was a good woman. The more time he spent around her, the more he realized how rarely he thought anybody else was actually good. Nice, maybe, but niceness was something anyone could be, whether they meant it or not. But goodness was another thing altogether.

She had been his first love, so maybe, in a way, she had the rightful claim to his heart. Maybe it was like how when you stepped out of the grocery store line to grab bread, no one could really be mad when you returned to your spot. It wasn't cutting if you had been there before.

He was, in a way, exactly how she’d remembered him, tall and leanly muscled like a wild cat. But even in the hazy bar, she could read hard years in his eyes, and his weariness startled her. He scratched the scruff on his chin, waving over Lorna and pointing lazily to Desiree’s glass.

Maybe she would have been able to endure all this if it weren’t for everyone’s obsession with lightness. Syl Guillory and Jack Richard arguing in the barber shop about whose wife was fairer, or her mother yelling after her to always wear a hat, or people believing ridiculous things, like drinking coffee or eating chocolate while pregnant might turn a baby dark. Her father had been so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn his arm over to see the blue of his veins. But none of that mattered when the white men came for him, so how could she care about lightness after that?

Erika was a stout sprinter from Brooklyn who complained about Los Angeles endlessly, the smoggy air, the traffic, the lack of trains. Her grievances only made Jude realize how grateful she felt. Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it. On move-in day, Erika had glanced at Jude’s two suitcases and asked, “Where’s the rest of your stuff?” Her own desk was cluttered with records, photographs of friends taped to the walls, her closet stuffed with shimmery blouses. Jude, quietly unpacking everything she owned, said that her other things were still in storage.

If you want to sound truly English, you must learn to speak the language really badly. It will not be difficult, there are many language schools where they teach you exactly that. (If you are unlucky you may choose one of the old-fashioned ones and be taught English as it should be, and not as it is, spoken.)

Sometimes you could understand why Stella passed over. Who didn’t dream of leaving herself behind and starting over as someone new? But how could she kill the people who’d loved her? How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back? That was the part that Jude could never understand.

In the last century, when a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut of without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared: ‘We are not amused’; and the whole British nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen was.

IN my early days there were stories about funny refugees murdering the English language. A refugee woman goes to the greengrocer to buy red oranges (I mean red inside), very popular on the Continent and called blood oranges. ‘I want two pounds of bloody oranges.’ ‘What sort of oranges, dear?’ asked the greengrocer, a little puzzled. ‘Bloody oranges.’ ‘Hm...’ He thinks. ‘I see. For juice?’ ‘Yes, we are.’ Another story dates from two years later. By that time the paterfamilias — the orange-buying lady’s husband — has become terribly, terribly English. He meets an old friend in Regents Park, and instead of talking to him in good German, softly, he greets him in English, loudly. ‘Hallo, Weinstock.... Lovely day, isn’t it? Spring in the air.’ ‘Why should I?

Desiree witnessed the first lynching but would forever imagine the second, how her father must have been sleeping, his head slumped, the way he nodded off in his chair after supper. How the thundering boots woke him. He screamed, or maybe had no time to, his swollen hands bandaged and useless at his sides. From the closet, she’d watched the white men drag her father out of the house, his long legs drumming against the floor. She suddenly felt that her sister would scream, so she squeezed her hand over Stella’s mouth and seconds later, felt Stella’s hand on her own. Something shifted between them in that moment. Before, Stella seemed as predictable as a reflection. But in the closet, for the first time ever, Desiree hadn’t known what her sister might do.

Before you are admitted to British citizenship you are not even considered a natural human being. I looked up the word natural (na’tural) in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (p. 251); it says: Of or according to or provided by nature, physically existing, innate, instinctive, normal, not miraculous or spiritual or artificial or conventional.... Note that before you obtain British citizenship, they simply doubt that you are provided by nature.

Oh, you're American,' said Mrs. Khan, holding out her hand. 'What a charming costume.' 'The Bengal Lancers were apparently a famous Anglo-Indian regiment,' said the young man. He pulled at his thighs to display the full ballooning of the white jodhpurs. 'Though how the Brits conquered the empire wearing clown pants is beyond me.' 'From the nation that conquered the West wearing leather chaps and hats made of dead squirrel,' said the Major.

...Cool. A Brit in the fam. Jesslyn, shut up, honey, now's not the time, Aiden said. Well, I think it is. Entirely too serious when everyone should be celebrating...I know if I was ever given a second chance with the children that I'll never get back, I sure as hell wouldn't question the whys or how-comes. It's time for a celebration. More than one. Babies, pregnancies and now marriages...And Darya... Ian looked at Aiden. Is she always like this? Yes, his brother answered him...

Later, Kennedy would realize how often her mother used money to avoid discussing her past, as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything: why her mother owned no family photographs, why no friends from high school ever called, why they’d never been invited to a single wedding or funeral or reunion. “We were poor,” her mother would snap if she asked too many questions, that poverty spreading to every aspect of her life. Her whole past, a barren pantry shelf.

An average English house combines all the curses of civilisation with the vicissitudes of life in the open. It is all right to have windows, but you must not have double windows because double windows would indeed stop the wind from blowing right into the room, and after all, you must be fair and give the wind a chance. It is all right to have central heating in an English home, except the bath room, because that is the only place where you are naked and wet at the same time, and you must give British germs a fair chance.

Some hoped, watching Desiree hold the hand of the little dark girl, that the two wouldn't even stay that long. They weren't used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them. Each time that girl passed by, no hat or nothing, they were as galled as when Thomas Richard returned from the war, half a leg lighter, and walked around town with one pant leg pinned back to that everyone could see his loss. If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.

Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself. That person existed for everyone, probably, an alternative self that lived only in the mind. But hers was real. Stella rolled over in bed each morning and looked into her eyes. Other times it felt like living with a foreigner. Why are you not more like me? she’d think, glancing over at Desiree. How did I become me and you become you? Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other lacked.

Shadi had driven her to the passport office to get her picture taken. He already had stamps in his from visits to France, South Africa, and Kenya, and she realized, waiting in the tiny office, that her mother had never even left the country. This would be her life, accomplishing the things her mother had never done. She never celebrated this, unlike her friends who were proud to be the first in their family to go to college or the first to earn a prestigious internship. How could she be proud of lapping her mother, when she had been the one to slow her down in the first place?

And what would she have told Early if she knew how to reach him? That she was sorry for what her mother said? Or for what she hadn’t said in his defense? That she wasn’t like the folks she’d come from, although she wasn’t sure that was even true anymore. You couldn’t separate the shame from being caught doing something from the shame of the act itself. If she hadn’t believed, even a bit, that spending time with Early was wrong, why hadn’t she ever asked him to meet her at Lou’s for a malt? Or take a walk or sit out by the riverbank? She was probably no different from her mother in Early’s eyes. That’s why he’d left town without saying good-bye.

THE ENGLISHMAN’S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT)   (Bloat): The Englishman’s very shy, He’s none of your Ca-sa-no-va, At bowling the ladies o-ver, A-mericans lead the pack—   (Tantivy): —You see, your Englishman tends to lack That recklessness transatlantic, That women find so romantic Though frankly I can’t see why . . .   (Bloat): The polygamous Yank with his girls galore Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits,   (Tantivy): Though he’s secretly held in re-ve-rent awe As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz. . . .   (Together): If only one could al-ly A-merican bedroom know-how With British good looks, then oh how Those lovelies would swoon and sigh, Though you and I know the Englishman’s very shy.

So why did you move here?” Stella asked. “The Estates, I mean.” Loretta raised an eyebrow. “Why did you?” “Well, the schools. It’s a nice neighborhood, don’t you think? Clean. Safe.” She gave the answers she ought to, although she wasn’t so sure. She’d moved to Los Angeles for Blake’s job and sometimes she felt like she’d had no say in the matter. Other times, she remembered how thrilling the possibility of Los Angeles had seemed, all those miles between there and her old life. Foolish to pretend that she hadn’t chosen this city. She wasn’t some little tugboat, drifting along with the tide. She had created herself. Since the morning she’d walked out of the Maison Blanche building a white girl, she had decided everything.

While the Rumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. ‘We want our friends to see us in this light,’ the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. ‘But it’s not such a favourable light,’ I protested feebly. ‘It’s a very human light and that is the most favourable,’ retorted the official. I was crushed. A few weeks later my drooping spirit was revived when I heard of a suburban bank manager whose wife had brought this book home to him remarking that she had found it fairly amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When he had finished, he stood up and said: ‘Downright impertinence.’ And threw the book into the fire. He was a noble and patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been more like him in England. But I could never find another.

Kershaw had long ago realized, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying - which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you - while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said 'good morning, sir' and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

She shifted gears as they left Worth Avenue, hurtling them along the beach at just sublight speed. “Jesus, Addison, you are so blind,” she finally exploded. “She comes in playing the damsel in distress, and you buy all of it.” “She did n—” “‘Oh, Richard, I need your help,’” she mimicked, doing a startlingly good impression of Patricia’s soft, cultured Brit—especially since the two women had barely spoken a total of five words to one another. “’I’ve left Peter, and I so badly want to make a new start, but I just don’t know how to do it on my own. You’re so big and strong and successful, can’t you see it in your heart to help me?’” Samantha canted her eyes at him. “Did it go a little like that?” Christ. “Maybe,” he hedged. “But—” “See? She wants you back.” “Well, she can’t have me. I’m taken. But she asked for my help, and I’m partially the reason she’s in this position.” “No, she put herself on her back and then you put her in the next position.” “Even so—” “You can’t resist putting on your shining armor, can you?” she said more calmly, blowing out her breath. “And if I know it, then she knows it, too.” “Honestly, Samantha, I think it’s more a matter of Patricia actually being helpless than her acting that way to gain my assistance. I doubt she could find a grocery store on her own, much less the toothpaste aisle.” “But she’s not after toothpaste.” As they stopped at a light, Richard leaned over and grabbed Samantha’s face, kissing her hard on her surprised mouth. “Don’t worry about this. You won’t have to deal with her.” “Maybe not, but you will. And keep in mind that she’s got a subscriber website where she gives advice about how not to get screwed in a divorce.” “She does?” “Yes. Interesting stuff. You really need to spend more time surfing the ’net.” “Shit.” Before Samantha could follow up her smug look with more commentary, he took a breath. “I’ll make dumping the website a condition of my helping her.” “Great. She won’t need the site, anyway, because she’ll be busy screwing you over in person, instead.” “No one screws me over, Samantha. Ever.” “Yet, smart guy. Yet.