Various

“ No more popular history of the War has been written; it has been eulogised everywhere, for it is a book that every citizen of the Empire should read and be proud to possess. As a Christmas gift it is ideal, and will be gladly welcomed not only by those at home, but also by those in Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, and other parts of our far-flung Empire, whose gallant sons shared the horrors and the victory of those four-and-a-half years. ”

“ Punch's History of the Great War" is a History we can all read, and all should read, for here is the record of the heroes who added to the glories of our blood and State—a roll that is endless—wonderful gunners and sappers, and airmen and despatch riders, devoted surgeons and heroic nurses, stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers. "But Mr. Punch's special heroes are the Second-Lieutenants and the Tommy who went on winning the War all the time, and never said that he was winning it until it was won." ”

“ Jean Chartres is a common product of the age, the sort of girl that insists on "having a good time" and "living her life" and "being herself" (how well one knows the jargon!) . Less common, let us hope, is the woman who would desert her husband, as Jean did, because the injuries he had received in the War prevented him from giving her the kind of life for which she craved. Foolish rather than vicious, she drifts into a relationship which could have had only one conclusion, if her lover, tiring of platonics, had not prematurely pressed his demands. ”

“ He would like to ask the House which had done most in the War—Tanks or Banks.
The speech of the evening. Witty and well-argued. But he must not fidget with his waistcoat-buttons.
W. S. Churchill (Hivites) said that this was a revolutionary motion. Sport and Science must stand together. True sport was scientific and true scientists were sportsmen. (Applause.) Together they would stand as an imperishable bulwark against the relentless tide of Socialism. Divided they would fall.
A steadily improving speaker, but he must not recite. ”

“ B. Bennion follows the vogue for confidentially descriptive covers in announcing, as a title to his volume of angling reminiscences, that The Trout are Rising in England and South Africa (Lane) and suggesting that here is "a book for slippered ease." One is certainly warned not to expect anything very strenuous in its course, and indeed so placidly flow its waters that few, perhaps, but devotees of the craft will follow it to the end. ”

“ As winter draws on the evolutions of birds great and small are a never-ending source of surprise and delight. Many hooded crows are now to be seen consorting with the rooks in the field and swelling the sable multitude that flies at evensong towards the park trees. And great congregations of plovers, curiously self-sufficing in their ability to dispense with the services of any feathered parson, lend colour and subconscious uplift to marshland scenes, which would otherwise look extremely triste. ”

“ Whilst we quite agree that a referee must exercise a strong control it is perfectly obvious that no self-respecting woman player is going to allow any mere man to have the last word; and the sooner the Football Association realise this and dispense with the services of all male referees the better for the good of the game. ”

“ I met a philosopher the other day—he is not a philosopher by profession, but an architect—who told me that, when annoyed by the anomalies and petty red-tape restrictions of life or irritated by incompetence and incivility, or even when he feels that he can amend somebody else's error or propose an improvement, it is his habit to write a letter expressing his indignation or embodying his suggestions. ”

“ On a side-table, impervious to their surroundings and apparently unconcerned with their significance, sit the crucial boots.
"How say you, Absalom Adkins"—such the concluding words of the Clerk, the finish of the prologue which rings up the curtain on this human drama—"how say you? Are you guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty," says Absalom, and that ends it.
Later a large and enthusiastic crowd outside (had there been one) might have seen a man with clean and sharp-cut features carrying a bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other, stepping lightly on to a Bilbury corporation tram, station bound. ”

“ PUNCH,
OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. Vol. 159. November 24, 1920.
[pg 401] CHARIVARIA.
No sooner had the League of Nations met at Geneva than news came of the pending retirement of Mr. Charlie Chaplin. We never seem to be able to keep more than one Great Idea going at a time.
"Have you read Mrs. Asquith's Book?" asks an evening paper advertisement. "What book?" may we ask.
"In our generation," says Dean Inge, "there are no great men." It is said that Sir Eric Geddes will not take this lying down. ”

“ It is not every woman who has the good luck, when rushing blindly out of the House of Peril into the wintry night (in a ball-dress) , to find—what had apparently escaped Jean's memory for the moment—that her faithful husband's estate is in the immediate neighbourhood. Though Lady Troubridge's sense of style is not impeccable she can tell a good tale; her dialogue rings true and her characters are well observed. The trouble with most authors of Society novels is that either they know their subject but can't write, or that they can write but know nothing of their subject. ”

“ It is "a corrective record," says The Times, "not only of what happened 'over there,' but of what people were saying and feeling at home"; while The Morning Post remarked: "Here Mr. Punch is the nation, deftly wielding the weapon of ridicule that has helped to kill so many enemy tyrants." ”

“ Now Venizelos is fifty-five years of age, and I cannot allow the term "very old" to be applied to him without protest; I am too nearly his contemporary. "Getting on," if you like, "mature," "ripe," but not "very old." You must keep that phrase for the people who—well, who are very old. ”

“ My hope is that quiet perusal may demonstrate that the fare has, at any rate, a grain of logic on his side if he looks upon himself as defrauded. We don't, you know, take your cabs for the joy of sitting in them, or for the pleasure of watching you struggling with a crank, but to be conveyed quickly from place to place. It is wrong to ask us to pay for the time spent by you in persuading your engine to behave, and it is indecent to become abusive when we act on that assumption. ”

“ D. Lloyd George, Proposer (School House) , said that Science had won the War, and quoted Wireless Telegraphy and Daylight Saving to prove this. The most successful Generals had had a scientific training. His uncle had met a General who knew algebra and used it at the Battle of the Marne. Only two first-class cricketers had ever been in the Cabinet. Three scientists had. The earth went round the sun. The moon went round the earth. Rivers flowed into the ocean.
An improving speaker, who is inclined to be carried away by his enthusiasm. ”

“ What you seem to forget is that most people at times are their own Gloomy Deans: some of us too often; and there can be too much of a good thing. Hopelessness butters no parsnips and it is a mood not to be encouraged or the world would be as bad as we then think it. ”

“ The author's yarns indeed are numerous and, on the whole, as an angler's yarns should be, picturesque. If he does seem to enjoy the rather feeble joke or incident as much as the other sort, that may be natural in a book of ease, whether slippered or not. Indeed one half suspects it is as a book for his own ease that the writer is mainly considering it, yet, taken in the right spirit and especially if you are an enticer of trout, it may be for your ease too. Of course, if you are not an angler and if your spirit is not right, the slipper may not fit. ”

“ The Newcastle Directors replied that under the laws of the Football Association the goal-keeper is required to wear distinctive colours from the rest of the team. That being so, Hilda Smith would only consent to turn out in future on condition that she should play in goal, and as the club management would not agree to displacing Fanny Robinson the only thing to be done was to leave Hilda Smith out of the side entirely. ”

“ As for the moral, it would seem to be that, if (as is more than probable) you have no copy of the works of Aristotle in your Fifth Avenue library, and imagine, never having heard of the happy mean, that virtue lies in one of two excesses—an excess of idle luxury or an excess of efficiency—the former is the one to choose. ”

“ Self-praise, it used to be held, is no recommendation; but that was before the War. The War has altered so many things that it may have altered this too, and self-praise be the best recommendation of all. Mr. Punch hopes so, because he wants to indulge for the moment in extolling one of his own products ”

“ But never so strange as the effects you get on the stage when very English people play at being Americans. You have to be rather young and unsophisticated if such phrases as "He's putting it over on us," or "I'm not going to stand for that," generously peppered about the dialogue and recited in the purest of English accents, can persuade you to believe that you are getting the real local stuff. ”

“ Armageddon supervened, and the rest of Sir Eric Geddes' career is history. When a new and sure hand was needed [pg 405] at the Admiralty, Mr. Lloyd George was not long in making the only suitable choice. Sir Eric Geddes' bluff hearty manner, positively smacking, despite his inland training, of all that a viking ought to smack of, had long marked him out as the ideal ruler of the King's Navy, and his name was soon known and feared wherever the seagull dips its wing. ”

“ As long as the weather remains open I find it a good plan to plant flowers and shrubs which bloom in the spring. Proticipation is a cardinal asset in the outfit of the judicious gardener, and no time should be lost in completing the spring beds, as the cost of hair-mattresses is going up by leaps and bounds. ”

“ How would you like it if you were tied to work and every now and then a man came up to you in your club and said, "Old man, do come away with me to the Pyrenees and shoot jummel," or "Can't you spare a month, old fellow, to come stalking ibex in Montenegro with me?" or "Look here, you're just the chap I want to run over to Alaska with me for a pot at the grizzlies"?
Just a fortnight ago Brackley came and told me of a delightful rough shooting he had rented in an obscure corner of Ireland. According to him it was a congested snipe area. You could not see the pools for wild-duck. ”

“ Still, after all, local colour is no great matter so long as you get some recognisable aspect, though farcically presented, of human nature; but the trouble with this play is that while our sense of the probabilities is never too much outraged so long as the chief character is just a piece of inhuman machinery, the author lapses into the incredible the moment he tries to introduce a little humanity into his scheme. ”

“ After all, this lake is part of London, and London ratepayers should be entitled to their city's beauties as well as its necessities.
To a Pretty Girl.
My Dear,—I want you to be a little more merciful. The other day, when your father, over the eggs and bacon, was reading out the news from Greece, with the defeat of Venizelos, you said lightly that exile didn't matter very much because Venizelos was a very old man. You then returned to the absorbing occupation of identifying Society people, reading from left to right. ”

“ Our fashion experts are to journey to London with both teams, and a detailed description of the hats and travelling costumes worn by the players will appear in an extra special edition of this paper. We understand that the two rival elevens are to turn out in silk jumpers knitted in correct club colours by the players' own fair hands during the more restful periods of their strenuous training. ”

“ He said everything would have gone off well if somebody had not made a noise like a policeman.
"All men are cowards," declares a lady-writer in a weekly journal. Still it should be remembered that one of us married the lady who is now known as "Mrs. Grundy."
In describing a storm a local paper recently stated that waves seventy feet high lashed themselves to fury against the rocks. We have always been given to understand that waves never exceed fifteen feet, but we suppose everything has gone up since the War. ”

“ A D'ANNUNZIO DIALOGUE. [From which will be perceived not only that telephonic communication exists between Fiume and Lucerne, but also that there is an easy way out of the difficulty with Greece if only the League of Nations will utilise the instrument that lies to their hand.] ”

“ Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
Inevitably one's first thought on sighting A Naval History of the War (Hodder and Stoughton) is that he must be a brave skipper indeed who would take out a lone ship, however excellently found, to cruise such controversial waters. But Sir Henry Newbolt is an experienced hand, and, though (so to speak) one finds him at times conscious of Sir Julian Corbett on the sky-line, he brings off his self-appointed task triumphantly. ”