I couldn’t help laughing when I found that an Australian senator, Cory Bernardi, had deleted all his tweets from Twitter, apart from a single sad survivor: ‘Parliament finishing up for the year.’ Mr Bernardi had earlier in 2015 tweeted a striking quotation: ‘To know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.’ He attributed it to Voltaire. In fact it is a remark by someone called Kevin Alfred Strom, a neo-Nazi white separatist from Alaska.
Quotations in speech often bore. I always thought it odd that John Tregorran in The Archers came out with literary quotations in conversation. No wonder Carol poisoned him. But letters to the press often have a quotation chucked in. Often it is: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’
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