“One result of the nobility and gentry becoming more mobile and mixing more together was new kinds of parties. From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, whenever people decided to entertain, they did so in much the same way. They gave either a dinner on its own, or a dinner combined with dancing. The latter combination started with a meal, sometimes enlivened by music. After dinner the company retired to a withdrawing room, and passed an hour or so by taking tea or dessert, or playing cards, or listening to more music. They then returned to the room where they had dined, for dancing or as it tended to be called, a ball; in the early eighteenth century as few as seven couples dancing together could be described as a ball. After dancing there was normally some kind of light refreshment, and then everybody went home. The refreshments at the end might, according to the century, be described as a banquet or a supper, the room for dinner and dancing a great chamber or a saloon; the dances danced, the music played and the food eaten changed, but the pattern remained much the same. The guests did one thing at a time, and they all did it together.”

Mon 14 Feb 2011.
From PM and Broadcasting House

Chapter 2 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch02.htm, originally published in Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_2.htm (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28.
https://www.marxists.org/chinese/big5/nonmarxists/mao/19270300.htm.湖南農民運動考察報告
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book)
Context: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (1978)

Source: A Woman of No Importance

Cassandra (1860)

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 420

Interview with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2007)