Nobody said what they really wanted, what they really thought. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness; and finally, it became pathetic. I could see that my host and his wife had a genuine love of Greece, but it lay choked in their throats. The critic made a perceptive little disquisition on Leavis; and then ruined it by a cheap squirt of malice. We were all the same; I said hardly anything, but that made me nor more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at intelligent European humanity.
John Fowles, “The Magus”, 1977.
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