India After Gandhi - pg. 54

The larger native states had their own railroad, currency, and stamps, vanities allowed them by the Crown. Few had any modern industry; fewer still had modern forms of education. A British observer wrote in the early twentieth century that, taken as a whole, the states were "sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autoccratic power sometimes exercised by vicious and deranged ." This roughly, was also the view of the  main nationalist party, the Congress.

The Obscene Bird of Night - pg. 10

hey, do a little dance for us, Gina, the urge her, come on, do your stuff ... tossing her neck back like a mare, she twirls her long wavy hair, swaggering down the aisle, a look of ecstasy in her eyes half-closed like those of actresses in cheap illustrated love stories ... I don't feel lazy anymore, I'm not yawning, I want to get out and dance like Gina the actress who lived in  a convent run by bad nuns in the love story Eliana read to me ...

The Isles Of Greece

The mountains look on Marathon --
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
...
Must we but weep o'er days more blest?
Must we but blush? – Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.