Category: rough notes
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0 The quotes below are from Benjamin Markovits’s Childish Loves (2011). Some are from the ‘contemporary’ section and some from the 18thC and 19thC pastiche. Can you tell? (In my day maybe half the English department, and a quarter of the history…
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–W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892).The quotes below are from the shorter New York version. “how deep in the mud must a woman walk before a man considers her progress interesting?” p. iv “you excite expectations, though you have not yet…
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Jonathan Safran Foer wrote his first novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) when he was only 25.Some quotes from the book: 1. But first I am burdened to recite my good appearance. p. 3 2. … because unless I do not want…
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Last May, we went to the National Theatre for a revival of London Assurance, an early Victorian comedy by Dion Boucicault (1841). The play received consistently good notices and we can see why. Although far from a perfect play, the…
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. The title of Allan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty (2004) is a reference to William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1801): . the wavering line, which is a line more productive of beauty […], as in flowers, and other…
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– “The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.” “Intemperance in…
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–– See this post about a famous parrot in the literary world. In Paul West’s Lord Byron’s Doctor (1989), J. W. Polidori writes, ‘He [Byron] never actually said Pretty Polly, but it was in his eye, all right, and I suppose I was a…
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Last December, we went to see Alan Bennett’s new play, The Habit of Art, which is about an imaginary meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten (this is in a way similar to Adam Fould’s novel The Quickening Maze, which…
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Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) is a fictional memoir of Wilde, written (supposedly) between 9 August 1900 and his death on 30 November that year. In the book, Wilde writes in a letter to a friend, ‘the…
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Who doesn’t like Montaigne (1533-1592), the very man who invented the essay genre? His writings are fun, wise, philosophical, sometimes provocative. He says these things: “If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they…
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In Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005), Penelope,1 Odysseus’s oh-so-loyal and virtuous wife, is dead. Hell is her current domicile. That does not stop her from telling the readers, who live in the modern age…
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Nicholas Ostler has a new book out: The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010). In it, he argues that English, today’s global lingua franca, will die out, following the pattern of former great languages Sanskrit and Latin. He…
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