It is difficult in a small compass to give a representative flavour of these fragments.  They range from the straightforwardly funny, such as this correction observed in an American newspaper — Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Revd. James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago — to the concentratedly wise, such as this remark by Jowett: Men get lazy, and substitute quantity of work for quality.

There is also some good advice for the conduct of life, such as Chesterfield's maxim that "Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings." But the reason for recalling Madan in  this column is that a number of the entries in his notebooks concerned wine.

Madan was no foe to drink. He is recorded as engaging in a Benedictine drinking competition with Cys Asquith, managing to down a very creditable 12 glasses; and after his retirement from the City he developed an expertise in what Asquith described as "those great clarets which are ‘for advanced students only'." In one sense this is hardly surprising. If one had to summarise Madan's character one would call him an epicure.  The fragments and aphorisms he transcribed into his notebooks and then, after a careful triage, distributed among his friends, show him approaching literature and life precisely as a connoisseur approaches wines, as Shane Leslie observed: "He collected good talk and carefully bottled a good story — he loved the subtle, the bewildering, the academical, all that was like a rich distilled liqueur which he retained in infinitesimally small bottles for private use, leaving eventually the massed collections like a cellar to be tasted to his own memory."