Journalists From England

"The Press is at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people. It is the visible speech if not the voice of the democracy. It is the phonograph of the world."

"No journalist is omnipotent, and even the most powerful journalist cannot influence those who do not read his paper. But within the range of his circulation — and readers, of course, are much more numerous than subscribers — he may be more potent than any other man. The damnable iteration day after day of earnest conviction wears like the dropping of water upon the stone."

"What a marvellous opportunity for attacking the devil!"

"It is the great inspector, with a myriad eyes, who never sleeps, and whose daily reports are submitted, not to a functionary or department, but to the whole people."

"The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, gray-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream."

"Anyone can prove anything except that anything’s worth proving."

"The air seemed to be filled with the perfume of some bitter spice. Viola could fancy almost that she saw a smoldering campfire and heard far off the roar of some desolate wild beast. She let her long hair fall, raising the heavy strands of it in either hand as she moved slowly to the laden music. Slowly her body swayed with drowsy grace, slowly her satin shoes slid over the silver sand."

"Perhaps the prayer that is offered when the time for praying is over is more terribly pathetic than any other. Yet one might hesitate to say that this prayer was unanswered."

"He was so disrespectful that it was believed that he spoke truth."

"How madly she danced that night!"

"I shall leave this farm-house very soon. The people are all right, but they are people, and therefore insufferable."

"Modernity kills ghostly romance."

"Outside everything was uncannily visible in the light of the full moon, but here in the dark shaded alleys the night was conscious of itself."

"Once more the music came. This time it was a dance of caprice, pelting along over the violin-strings, leaping, laughing, wanton. Again an illusion seemed to cross her eyes. An old king was watching her, a king with the sordid history of the exhaustion of pleasure written on his flaccid face. A hook-nosed courtier by his side settled the ruffles at his wrists and mumbled, Ravissant! Quel malheur que la vieillesse! It was a strange illusion. Faster and faster she sped to the music, stepping, spinning, pirouetting; the dance was light as thistle-down, fierce as fire, smooth as a rapid stream."

"In her fantastic mood she stretched her soft, clasped hands upward toward the moon. 'Sweet moon,' she said in a kind of mock prayer, 'make your white light come down in music into my dancing-room here, and I will dance most deliciously for you to see.' She flung her head backward and let her hands fall; her eyes were half closed, and her mouth was a kissing mouth. 'Ah! sweet moon,' she whispered, 'do this for me, and I will be your slave; I will be what you will.'"

"On bitter nights in winter the moon called her and she came, when the breath was vapor, and the trees that circled her dancing-room were black, bare skeletons, and the frost was cruel."

"For the gardens of the few who can give them warm walls in the most sheltered parts of Great Britain, two scented January-flowering treasures are ' and Freylinia cestroides. With its globe-shaped head of flowers, ranging from deep butter to cream-colour on the same head (the flowers turn cream-colour as they fade), its sweet scent and the length of time it remains in bloom, E. chrysantha is a most attractive plant, and the buff-coloured flowers of fill the air with fragrance in mid-winter."

"The most famous of Elizabethan gardening authorities was , who came of a well-known family. When he left , Hugh Platt became a member of , and being given a generous allowance by his father he was able to devote many years to literary work. He became keenly interested in and agriculture and was in communication with all the authorities in this country. His own gardens at , , and were famous, and his (reprinted later under the title of The Garden of Eden) is full of information gleaned in all parts of England ..."

"In midwinter, when few fresh herbs except , , , , and are available, dried herbs can be used, also or ..."

"' WATER STAR GRASS C. An uncommon little aquatic with bronzed grassy foliage and small bright yellow flowers lying flat on the water surface. It is easy to grow, does not attract algae and merits more general cultivation. Tropical America."

"Neptunia plena A warm-water aquatic of great charm with opposite pairs of finely pinnate leaves, reminiscent of '. Like that plant they are sensitive to the touch."

"The most attractive time in is in spring when the bank sloping from the terrace is thick with s and ."

"(Bee-Balm; Oswego Tea). Robust plants with brilliant flowers, often grown on the banks of streams and lakes for the colour they impart to the surroundings. In masses they form striking effects …"

"The sometimes attacks in natural lakes, destroying the roots or eating the hearts of the flowers. Trapping and shooting are the only remedies."

"Queen Elizabeth came twice to Oxford: once in 1566 and again in 1592."

"(C. esculenta of ). A robust species, growing about 2 ft. high, with large dark blue flowers, the irregularly spaces segments of which are twisted and wither independently. Western North America."

"Aquilegia (') .—The dainty columbines are almost too well known to need description and there can be few who will not appreciated their charms in the border. Planted in groups about 12 inches apart, they are a joy from May to July and associate well with subjects such as ', s, , s, ' or ferns ..."

"The oldest book dealing with the virtue of herbs is the , circa 900–950. This Leech Book was evidently the manual of a Saxon doctor and it is the oldest existing Leech Book written in the ."

"' ( Señorita Water-lily] is a of a delicate lavender-blue shade with golden s tipped with blue. It is very free, but the flowers are small, rarely more than 3 or 4 in. across. It hails from Mexico and Texas."

", of the most noted of the day, entered the service of the as an assistant gardener. In 1826 he was made head-gardener. His name at is chiefly associated with the remarkable he designed, which was begun in 1836 and finished in 1840."

"Even in only very wealthy men had separate gardens merely for pleasure, whilst all the small s and s throughout the country still retained the old . For over seven centuries before that time, all the gardens in England were herb gardens, and very beautiful they must have been, for s, , s, , , , , s, , s, and s were all used as herbs."

"Of s we knew nothing till we learnt about them from the s; and they were only introduced into England in . It was about the same time that s were first cultivated in this country, but s were unknown till . The is an indigenous plant in the , but of the we were ignorant till the Flemish immigrants in the early seventeenth century introduced them. To them also we owe our present garden , which has had a long journey to reach us, for it is said to have come from Asia through Spain. The was used by our ancestors from , and one of the Saxon names for March was "sprout-kale month"; but otherwise the whole ' tribe were unknown to us till the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

"Being rich in farinaceous matter s are cultivated in the Orient for food. The seeds—known as s—can be eaten raw or can be used in soups and various Japanese and Chinese dishes. ... In the Orient the plant is held sacred to Buddha who is thought to have been born in the heart of a Lotus blossom. The comprises a Lotus flower, the and two crossed Palm branches. Incidentally Hindus compare their country to the Lotus, the petals suggesting Central India and the leaves the surrounding provinces."

"are native to Central and South Africa, so that it is hardly surprising to find them real sun lovers in the garden."

"One thing I really get annoyed with is this notion that journalists – in every film, every magazine article I see – must really get off on the adrenaline. It’s so wrong; it trivialises what we do."

"There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice."

"People don't understand that objectivity actually means pursuing the truth. But you get there by giving all sides a hearing, which doesn’t mean treating all sides equally—then you are an accomplice in these extreme situations."

"Do you know what? I think you will find that orthodoxies of all the established religions basically always go for us [women]. We always pay the price, the political price, the cultural price. Just look at what is happening in America."

"Of course, not everybody’s going to agree on everything and nor should they. But unless we can agree that the sky outside is blue and the grass is green, we have no chance."

"When #MeToo exploded, there was that real anger; you know, just what is it about the fact that we have breasts and we have genitals that still appears to be a great big green go sign for half the population? I believe that everybody who engages in that behaviour needs to be held accountable."

"It seems that publishers have awakened to the realization that the history of technology can provide some very good stories. Six years ago we had 's colorful account of 's epic struggle to make a , . Now Bella Bathurst has made an excellent yarn out of the careers of the who built most of the lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. The story was told with more solidity in 1978 by Craig Mair as A Star for Seamen. But not to worry: there is a splendid archive of Stevenson family material, much of it now in the , and Bathurst has drawn on this and other primary material to construct her story."

"In Holland, the subject of one of her most satisfying chapters, she marvels at a cycling landscape that could have been reclaimed from the sea with the bicycle in mind, and discovers that, far from taking to two wheels like ducks to water, doughty Dutch velocipedists of the mid-19th century were bombarded with stones and coal by locals who accused them of traumatising the . Modern Dutch cyclists have taken the land into their own hands. She examines a where, thanks partly to a parallel and partly to the "bizarre" notion that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist, the accident rate per 100 cycled is 0.8 – a tenth of that in the UK."

"Bathurst is a restless, curious writer, and she interweaves the story of her own experiences with imaginative research around hearing and sound. She interviews people who were and those who have , from army veterans to s to s. She visits an ear-splitting shipbuilders’ yard, and sits in an anechoic chamber; she interviews a professor of and an . In every chapter she comes up with gems of information. ... Bathurst’s story provides a satisfying narrative arc. After 12 years of her hearing gradually deteriorating, she was diagnosed with a disorder called , which can be cured by means of a delicate operation to the . Results are variable but in Bathurst’s case the operation was a success, and her hearing was almost completely recovered."

"At this time, in 2004, I am deaf. Not completely deaf, just down to about 30 per cent of normal hearing. I had started to lose my hearing in both ears about seven years ago and it has been declining ever since. I wear s in both ears and when I take them out, I can hear individual fragments of sound but not really the links between them. Certain words in a sentence or specific sounds are audible, but music is only a beat and a voice is just a chain of broken s."

"Any very loud may eventually damage or disrupt the and lead to the death of s, whether that's an always on full volume or . Sometimes that damage results in hearing loss and sometimes it results in , where true sound is replaced by sounds the brain itself has made. Some people hear hissing or fizzing or clicking, or a steady like an internal . Tinnitus can be loud or soft, constant or intermittent, but of all the different kinds of s it's often considered the worst because it covers over the sounds that people want to hear with a drizzle of sound that they don't."

"Field Work’s aim is to broaden and insert nuance into our understanding of farming. Bathurst moves to live in a attached to Rise Farm, a 180-acre Welsh hill farm run by Bert and Alison Howell. ... Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her about the land. ... I thought often of ’s glorious agricultural novel All Among the Barley while reading Field Work. Partly it’s the engagement with a dying way of life. Partly it’s the fact that both books understand how important accurate and specific language is to bringing this rural existence alive on the page. Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her honestly and movingly about the land and their place within it. One passage, in which a young farmer describes night-time with her father, is among the loveliest pieces of writing I’ve read anywhere."

"Though few other countries had Britain's unique combination of advantages for a — island status, a vicious coastline, plenty of expensive traffic — almost every country with a coastline produced their own variants. There were Flemish wreckers, Spanish wreckers, Scandinavian wreckers. The French were such expert wreckers that they had been responsible for . In the , wrecks were so frequent that the eighteenth-century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage."

"Seven years ago, I moved into a farm on a hill near Wales. Rise Farm was run by Bert and Alison Howell, a couple in their seventies whose son had gone to live in Spain and whose main source of assistance was now their two s – Bryn and a dog who for a long time I genuinely believed to be called Come Here You Useless Bugger. Rise was one of a declining number of small farms making the best of the high places in the , places which would once have represented a generous living but which now struggled by on rents, subsidy and the heart-attack price of lamb."

"I must confess that I finished reading A Russian Diary feeling that it should be taken up and dropped from the air in vast quantities throughout the length and breadth of Mother Russia, for all her people to read."

"As I read A Russian Diary I wondered what on earth we have embassies in Russia for. How did it happen that our leaders so steadfastly ignored what they knew Putin was up to? Was it the hunger for gas? For the riches of the outrageous post-Communist sell-off of Russian state assets and manufacturing resources, through which our financial institutions participated in the rise of the thieving oligarchs? Or was it the blind desire to keep Russia 'on side', whatever the cost to her own impoverished people?"