The Spectator

A.L. Kennedy Novelist I dislike dates. It’s either a yes, or a no. Why date? Sadly, I am both bad at reading the signals which indicate the outbreak of a date and attractive to people who are bad at signals. This means that I end up — often in coffee shops — with a variety of men who suddenly exhibit enthusiasms I cannot return. Among these gentlemen would be the portly chap in Day-Glo cycle shorts, the man who brought an ugly plant with him, the man who cried, the man who talked unendingly about the rows he used to have with his last girlfriend, the man who sat next to me, miserably unable to speak at all, and the man who got crawling-drunk and then confessed something, mumbly, before hiding in his hotel room for a day.

From The Spare Bedroom, The Spectator, 12 December 1914: OUR national individuality has been threatened, with the result that all English institutions are at this moment specially dear to the Englishman. We are prepared to defend them from first to last—from the system of government to the spare bedroom. Indeed, though we may jestingly call the spare bedroom the least among our typically English institutions, it counts for a good deal in our national life. It has been instrumental in the development of the middle-class Englishman, and be, after all, is the typical Englishman. Among the bourgeoisies of Europe the English- man alone can have a friend to stay. He regards the power to dispense hospitality as a necessary part of his dignity.

From The New German Artillery, The Spectator, 12 December 1914: We shall have to wait a long time, we surmise, till the merits or demerits of the various new weapons are proved.Perhaps before judgment is delivered other new weapons will be introduced. The data are still very imperfect. We cannot say yet, for instance, whether the old-fashioned grenade will enjoy a revival in future wars owing to the fact that the out- flanking of one huge conscript array by another similar army is in many circumstances impossible. and that therefore the trenches of the two armies approach within a few yards of one another on a parallel front. At this moment, at all events, the rival armies in Flanders can easily throw hand-grenades across the narrow gap which separates them.