satirists-from-england

"Auribus immensis quondam donatus asellus institit ut caudam posset habere parem. cauda suo capiti quia se conferre nequibat, altius ingemuit de brevitate sua, mon quia longa satis non esset ad utilitatem. ante tamen quam sic apocopata foret, consuluit medicos, quia quod natura nequibat, artis ab officio posse putabat eos.Cui Galienus ait: "satis est bipedalis asello cauda; quid ulterius poscis, inepte, tibi? sufficit ista tibi, nam quo productior esset, sordidior fieret proximiorque luto. hac nisi contentus fueris, dum forte requiris prolongare nimis, abbreviabis eam. quod natura dedit non sit tibi vile, sed illud inter divitias amplius esse puta. crede mihi, vetus est tibi cauda salubrior ista natibus innata quam foret illa nova.""

"After-wittes are ever best."

"A bad excuse is better, they say, than none at all."

"He that goes to sea, must smel of the ship; and he that sayles into Poets wil savour of Pitch."

"He that readeth good writers, and pickes out their flowers for his owne nose, is lyke a foole."

"He is forced to go whom the devil drives."

"The Syrens song is the Saylers wrack."

"The same water that drives the mill, decayeth it."

"Poets are the whetstones of wit."

"The Woolf jettes in Weathers felles."

"Cedant arma togæ, concedat laurea linguæ."

"Pleasure is a sweet tickling of sense, with a present joy."

"Hyena speakes like a friend, and devoures like a Foe."

"The Harpies have Virgins faces, and vultures Talentes."

"Fond of your freedom spurn the venal fee, And prove he's only great—who dares to be free."

"With the sports of the field there's no pleasure can vie, While jocund we follow our hounds in full cry."

"Honour’s a mistress all mankind pursue, Yet most mistake the false one for the true: Lur’d by the trappings, dazzled by the paint, We worship oft the idol for the saint."

"Why, praise is satire in these sinful days."

"I wish my deadly foe, no worse Than want of friends, and empty purse."

"In the merry month of May, In a morn by break of day, Forth I walk’d by the wood-side Whenas May was in his pride: There I spièd all alone Phillida and Coridon."

"Come little babe, come silly soul, Thy father’s shame, thy mother’s grief, Born as I doubt to all our dole, And to thyself unhappy chief: Sing lullaby, and lap it warm, Poor soul that thinks no creature harm."

"We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb."

"When I was a fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye – such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based."

"Even half an hour after reading Tom Sharpe's 14th novel, it's difficult to remember what happened in it. ... Wilt is a victim of our times, and Sharpe doesn't seem to like them much. ... Sharpe might be happier in another age – the 18th century, perhaps – but even then he'd find plenty to rail against. It's tempting to see him as a contemporary Smollett: his plots are guided by whatever vices he feels like including, or whatever images are in his head."

"The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "" to Motor Mechanics."

"All is fair in love, war and tax evasion."

"I am in favour of foxhunting because foxes kill chickens"

"They have more luck than bulls"

"Sharpe is one of England's funniest writers. He's in the tradition of the 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote novels of ideas laced with physical, slapstick farce."

"Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and Vintage Stuff are books that hark back to a golden age of academic dottiness, of the kind that has all but disappeared since the 1940s when Sharpe himself was a student."

"Fifty miles away, Lord Lynchknowle’s dinner had been interrupted by the arrival of a police car and the news of his daughter’s death. The fact that it had come between the mackerel pâté and the game pie, and on the wine side, an excellent Montrachet and a Château Lafite 1962, several bottles of which he’d opened to impress the Home Secretary and two old friends from the Foreign Office, particularly annoyed him. Not that he intended to let the news spoil his meal by announcing it before he’d finished, but he could foresee an ugly episode with his wife afterwards for no better reason than that he had come back to the table with the rather unfortunate remark that it was nothing important. Of course, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that hospitality came first, and old Freddie was the Home Secretary after all, and he wasn’t going to let that Lafite ’62 go to waste, but somehow he knew Hilary was going to kick up the devil of a fuss about it afterwards."

"The authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State."

"There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk."

"'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'"

"Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked."

"President Bush doesn’t need toilet paper. He has Blair"

"The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and churchwardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country."

"While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact."

"By shooting your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house."

""Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools."

"If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal."

"I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials. ... There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with cream."

"Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money."

"The golden age of English caricature, from 1780 to 1830, was dominated by an artist of genius, James Gillray, who lifted the art of political caricature to a higher plain."

"There's something special about Gillray. I feel an affinity with him, because he was the first to have an obsession with politics and to do characters as intense as Fox and Pitt. My favourite Gillray is The Apotheosis of Hoche, a mock-elegy for a French revolutionary general. We don't remember now who Hoche was, but the print is so strong that it leaps out at you, including millions of decapitated heads singing the general's praises."

"[A]t the outrageous height of his career, he had been rightly regarded as the greatest exponent of lacerating caricature anywhere in Europe. Gillray revolutionised the art of satire, pushing himself to such extremes of savage, unfettered inventiveness that his admirers, and even his enemies, became addicted... [H]e is now increasingly seen as one of the finest British artists of his time. Cartoonists across the world are indebted to his brilliantly visual spleen. They include British practitioners Steve Bell, Peter Brookes, Martin Rowson, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman... They recognise that Gillray's work, far from succumbing to the ephemerality of most topical cartoons, contains some of the most enduring and astonishing images from a turbulent period in European history."

"It is the intention of this book to offer as complete an insight into the works and times of James Gillray as may be consistent with the limits of one volume...and...not losing sight of the responsibility of rejecting such subjects and matters as, after consideration, seem either too ephemeral and uninteresting to deserve preservation, or too boldly coloured with the coarseness of an age which did not hesitate, in its most polished circles, to treat of subjects that modern refinement has decided to pass over in silence."

"Certainly, the private life of James Gillray was disastrous; yet so clear-sighted was he, so ruthless in his regard for truth as he saw it (even in himself), that his drawings have a bitter verity almost unknown elsewhere in British art: a cruel rigour that makes him seem, in spirit, closer to the satirists of the Continent, where his art was, in fact, much admired. However remote the politics of Gillray's day may seem, to look at his caricatures is to be caught up, almost in spit of oneself, in the frenzies of this patriotic radical."

"Gillray tells us more about the eighteenth century than most written histories."

"Hogarth's honesty of purpose was as conspicuous in an earlier time, and we fancy that Gillray would have been far more successful and more powerful but for that unhappy bribe, which tuned the whole course of his humour into an unnatural channel."