“After my mother’s death, her maid became my nurse. . . . I think my father had a romantic mind. He took it into his head to build a house to live in during the summer. He bought a piece of land on the top of a hill at Suresnes. . . . It was to be like a villa on the Bosphorous and on the top floor it was surrounded by loggias. . . . It was a white house and the shutters were painted red. The garden was laid out. The rooms were furnished and then my father died.”

—Sommerset Maugham, from his biography, The Summing Up, as quoted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, 1970.