My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic.
Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.
Of all cities in the United States I have seen, San Francisco is the most beautiful.
The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.
You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills. And all the people are open and friendly.
San Francisco! City of dreaming spires, people live here... Golden Gate Bridge, ahh the Romans came here.
I love San Francisco. It would be a perfect place for a honeymoon.
But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.
San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world...I would probably rank it at the top or near the top. It's small but photogenic and has layers...You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done.
What the Londoner sees in his mind's eye is that cluster of towers and pinnacles seen from Pentonville Hill and outlined against a foggy sunset, and the great arc of Barlow's train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic of the hotel seen from gloomy Judd Street.
Few cities have been more definitely impressed upon the imagination of the world than San Francisco, this gray-hilled city on the peninsula by the hospitable bay, where Saint Francis protects the ships as he protected the birds of Assisi.
I think I would like to be in Victorian times. Small town. Bandstands. Summer. That kind of thing. Without disease.
The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.
Victorian architecture in the United States was copied straight from England.
In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.
It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.
In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.
Long ago life was clean, sex was bad and obscene, and the rich were so mean. Stately homes for the Lords, croquet lawns, village greens, Victoria was my queen.
