It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.
If I were a Writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy or familiar. I would chuse a huge lushious Style!
He visited the country house of a goldsmith, Sir Robert Viner, where ‘he showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies th...
He could not bear to part with his paintings because they were an aspect of his being.
Glass is material sea.
Books do not perish like humankind. Of course we commonly see them broken in the haberdasher's shop when only a few months before they lay bound on the stationer's stall; these are not tru...
And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get insidea book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wantedto be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stay...
A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king’s nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he...
A large proportion of Venetians worked in the textile industry. There were the lace-makers, their eyesight ruined by their labour. Children, from the age of five, were enrolled in the trade. The exqui...
Time. In another time. Either before or after. They were not stars,but fires. They were the souls of birds. They were entries into the vast fire. They were the eyes of the dead. And in the darkness th...
It was not simply the effect of an epigram but, rather, the product of a fertile mind and keen observation. Wit was the currency of the court of Charles II.
In the end the natives would be so mixed and mingled with the new settlers that the term Saxon or Angle ceased to have any meaning. All would become English.
If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless...
I believe now that there can be no real sense of loss or seperation withoutthe recognition of death; we were too young to consider any such eventuality,and simply moved on with our lives into some ind...
A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm wi...
I realized that my time in this place had come to an end; now that my schooldays were over, I no longer belonged here. I had always been a stranger and, if I stayed, I would become a stranger to mysel...
As the Great rise by degrees of Greatnesse to the Pitch of Glory, so the Miserable sink to the Depth of their Misery by a continued Series of Disasters. Yet it cannot be denied but most Men owe not on...
The music of a popular song now came from the radio as Hawksmoor gazed out of the window; and he saw a door closing, a boy dropping a coin in the street, a woman turning her head, a man calling. For a...
The financial penalties for murder, for example, were graded according to the ‘worth’ of the victim. It was a harsh and divisive society, only made possible by the continuous exploitation of the unfre...
So on 6 February 1685, the new king, James II, ascended the throne in the face of sustained and organized opposition from Shaftesbury and the Whigs. He was fifty-two years of age and in vigorous healt...