Oh, T.H.R-G!

From Robsjohn-Gibbings' petulant screed against the antique, "Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale":
"Those were the days, so help me, when it was the height of something to sit on a cassapanca upon a tiled floor amid frescoed walls and coffered ceiling- an interior of incredible gloom..."
(A cassapanca is a sort of Italiany hope chest, to which arms and a back could be added).

and on "French Gothic"

This confusion of the ecclesiastical and the secular, the result of too many visits to European churches and cathedrals by the American laity, struck few if any as incongruous. It seemed natural to hang your pants over a prie-dieu, keep the telephone book on a lectern, the cigars in a gutted hymnal, drape the walls with chasubles, put a chalice on the piano, and stand dolorous carved saints in the odd corners.

Somerset Maughham, Agatha Christie, Chanel, William James

The order of completion of the last four books I have read.
This was my second reading of "Cakes and Ale", and I enjoyed it even more than I had previously. It is the only Maugham I've ever attempted (other than a reluctant plunge into "Of Human Bondage"- a novel that should be quietly slid behind file cabinets and into elevator shafts while no one's looking)
I followed this up with Agatha Christie's "The Clocks", which had the irresistible murder of an unknown man who was to be found by a temp hire arriving at the house of an elderly blind woman whose home has been filled with clocks she does not own, all set to the same wrong time.
It became glaringly obvious that these were all red herrings and the murderer was fairly apparent. The motive was unsportingly peripheral to the story, and the eventual identity of the victim was never really a point of interest. It almost seemed an academic problem Agatha was solving, the premise made from words thrown improv style at her. Even if the victim is unsympathetic his death should inspire some sort of empathy in the reader. He was as inert as the clocks. Absurdly, after the murder was solved the blind woman turned out to be some sort of spy which in no way had anything to do with the victim.
Less skillfully, Edmonde Roux's prickly, defensive bio of Chanel largely consisted of extraordinary suppositions, diaphonous sources and a sense that Roux had no interest at all in fashion. So many sentences ended half-way through or trailed clauses into vaporous nothingness that the narrative shuddered to a stop. Additionally its poor translation into stilted English gave one the sensation of falling down a staircase.

From "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism"

a race of dogs bred for generations, say in the Vatican, with
characters of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every variety
of form and combination, ought to discriminate before long the finest shades of these
peculiar characters. In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, accomplished
connoisseurs of sculpture.
What this leaves out, of course, is the factor of active interest. The mind must have some interest in a given subject before it even begins to register impressions, let aone form opinions. "My experience is what I agree to attend to" is how James puts it. What the dogs will attend to in the scculpture gallery is "Who peed on this pedestal?"