From Alec Guinness' autobiography
Blessings in Disguise:
(16 yrs. old) The next thing for me to brush up some poetry in case the Cassons invited me to recite. I knew some Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which I found hysterically funny; also some Keats, Tennyson, Chesterton and a few yards of Shakespeare.
The last time I saw Sybil [Thorndike] to talk to was at a small private lunch party at the Garrick Club. She was an old lady by then, suffering acutely from arthritis but remarkably gallant and cheerful. I asked her if she still managed to learn a few lines of verse each day, which had been her life-long custom. 'Yes,' she said, 'but only a very few. I've given up the Greeks. But the real sadness is my silly old hands, which don't allow me to play Bach any more...'
I would be quite happy to see a return of black for mourning, and to hear no more electric guitars in church. Perhaps we could return to resounding hymns...
As I set off to join the Navy he [Guinness' father-in-law] handed me a pocket edition of Thucydides, saying, 'This will help you keep things in perspective.' Inside the book he had scribbled, 'Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.' It was a more acceptable gift than the vast unplucked turkey which he dumped, on Christmas Eve, in the kitchen of our tiny cottage. Seizing the duck we were going to have he said, 'That's just what I want; an extra duck,' and made off with it. The turkey wouldn't go in our oven anyway and Merula burst into tears. Not only had I found a wife; I had acquired a family.
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