Quotation by George Orwell

There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it, was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914 ... . from the whole decade ... there seems to breathe forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kinds of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and creme de menthe and soft- centered chocolates—an atmosphere, as it were of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song.