It was reported that the fireworks were beginning and Diana, ever enthusiastic, led the procession to the roof. I was bringing up the rear, had reached the top floor and was about to climb the ladder that led up from it, when I heard the sound of shattered glass followed, after what seemed to me a long interval, by the sound of a falling body. I opened a door from behind which the noise seemed to come and looked into a narrow box-room, on the floor of which Diana was lying. She had fallen through a skylight about twenty-five feet from the floor. The opening was so narrow that the large hat she was wearing remained on the roof. She had broken her thigh... This was not an auspicious beginning to our married life. ~ Duff Cooper in Old Men Forget (1955)

You find something agreeable in almost everyone. I am put off by anything not wholly agreeable. ~ Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Cooper.

Age wins and one must learn to grow old. I must learn to walk this long unlovely wintry way, looking for spectacles, shunning the cruel looking-glass, laughing…

First you are young; then you are middle-aged; then you are old; then you are wonderful.

Blind as I was, I tried to get out As the carriage fell in the ditch, And was caught in the wheels and killed.

He [Welles] was an onlooker at the clumsy, poignant suicide of 'The Man on the Ledge,' which took place in New York in 1938, when a boy perched for fourteen ho…

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a h…