Critics From England

"Every day, sometimes once, or twice, or even three times, she found herself drinking , or whisky, in the , the famous where flashy young s with padded shoulders, seedy old men of past fame, forgotten geniuses, tough young women whose finger-nails were no cleaner than Shute's, and the usual sprinkling of stars and pretenders, met daily, or nightly, for a quick drink, a dirty story, and perhaps a chance contact with someone useful."

"Why did I write this book? I have already written a book of s published as long as 1973. It was called ‘’The Escapist Generations’’. If some of my readers remember this other book they will find repetitions. The basic story is the same — childhood scenes in California, memories of — but this time I have written a book of confessions, something I have never done before. I am a private person. For many years I have managed to keep my secrets to myself, protecting the men and women I have loved. Now all my loved ones are dead and no longer vulnerable. No one is left who might be hurt or damaged by these confessions unless it is myself. The time has come to tell a story which requires to be told."

"|year=1992|page=9|isbn=9780709049623}} (252 pages; 1st part of quote; 2nd part of quote; last part of quote)"

"Nerina Shute, who began writing about films in the along with fellow reviewers Graham Greene and John Betjeman, and who, some 60 years later, rounded off her literary career with a frank about her , has died aged 96. Shute, who was the last survivor of a celebrated coterie of film critics of the 1930s, was celebrated also for her openness about her sexuality: she was predominantly lesbian, but married twice. In 1930, when she was 22, she shocked many by a novel which contained what she archly called an "ambisex-trous" woman character, while at 84 she wrote a memoir, Passionate Friendships, in which she was candid about her many love affairs."

"There is a tiny pause, right at the start of the film that caught at my heart, but I didn't think anyone else would notice it. It took me back to the work I did on my biography of Virginia Woolf. There were two documents in her archives that I found particularly distressing. One was the little soft-covered notebook she used for her diary for 1941. I knew there wouldn't be any entries after , but I couldn't help turning the blank pages that followed, unable to believe that the voice I had been living with for the past five years had stopped speaking. The other was her suicide note. (One of the suicide notes, in fact. She wrote three — two versions for her husband, , and one for her sister — unable to stop revising her work until the end.)"

"Emotions about our lost houses and gardens have to do with growing old and acquiring guilt: we are always leaving our first home and lamentingly looking back to it. The whole point of the Garden of Eden is that we are going to leave it, and then spend the rest of our time wishing we could return to it."

"When I was very young, I think I was aware that I was reading different kinds of books, which slightly took my teachers aback. I can remember boastfully telling my teacher, when I was about 10, that I was reading '. She clearly thought this was a bad idea. But I was a slightly odd, inward child. At home – we didn’t have television – I was reading, reading all the time."

"Of the many metaphors for biography, two make useful starting points. One — a disturbing image — is the autopsy, the forensic examination of the dead body which takes place when the is unusual, suspicious, or ambiguous. ... There is something gruesome about this metaphor. It is used when commentators on biography want to emphasize its ghoulish or predatory aspects. ... A contrasting metaphor for biography is the portrait. Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation, portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character. The portraitist simulates warmth, energy, idiosyncrasy, and personality through attention to detail and skill in representation."

"Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen, To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men."

"You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, You, who, with mocking pencil, wont to trace, Broad for self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face."

"He went about his work — such work as few Ever had laid on head and heart and hand — As one who knows, where there’s a task to do, Man’s honest will must Heaven’s good grace command."

"How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true."

"Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal – you sockdologizing old man-trap!"

"The Old World and the New, from sea to sea, Utter one voice of sympathy and shame! Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high, Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came."

"... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the men and women I have met in the flesh. Dickens is the novelist of the lettered and of the unlettered. The man at the street corner who has hardly heard of Thackeray knows all about and ."

", so Shakespeare relates, was often at the in , and there was the wonderful meetings of poets—Beaumont, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare himself—at the famous on the south side of ."

"In 1859 founded the ', and Thackeray became its first editor. Among his contributors were Tennyson, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, , , Ruskin, Trollope, , Adelaide Procter, Matthew Arnold, and Lord Lytton."

"... The had its . The had its . ... He drank prodigiously, even for the seventeenth century. He was subject to violent bursts of passion, and he had absolutely no self-control. He was the supreme bully. His greatest joy in life was to denounce, to jeer, and to hurt. And nature had eminently fitted him for the rôle that he had chosen. Jeffreys's one passion was a genuine hatred of and ..."

"Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remembered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities."

"was with at at the time of the in 1813. She went back to at the request of the , who assured her that the position of herself and her children was perfectly safe. The allied kings and statesmen waited on her. She was treated with the utmost deference, but it was she who grieved for in far more than , and before the began, Josephine, shriven and with her children kneeling by her side, died with the name of Bonaparte on her lips. Twenty thousand persons passed the catafalque where the Empress lay in state. Royal honours were hers at her funeral."

"... Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs essentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the people. And this is the fact that gives him his peculiar importance in the modern world."

"There is nothing in this wide world more romantic than a great river on the banks of which stands a great city, and of all the cities in Europe, London is luckiest in its river. The Seine at Paris, the Tiber at Rome, are insignificant compared to the wide sweep of the Thames at London."

"... During the Renaissance Luther and Calvin played their great rôles, and it saw Loyola and the little understood . At the beginning, Columbus and Da Gama make their voyages, and its later years were made romantic by the hazardous adventures of and Drake. It was the age of the , an age of adventure, an age of criticism, an age of laughter, an age of reaction and rejection, of destruction and reconstruction, of glory for princes and of suffering for the common people."

"Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination."

"... in condemning it should be remembered that the statesmanship of intrigue of which she was a mistress has survived from her time to ours, and was not destroyed even by the . She was the pupil of Machiavelli, and she put the theories of the Italian political philosopher into more successful practice than any other sovereign or statesman in history."

"It is improbable that Wycliff had much to do personally with the preparation of the , the first version four years afterward. This was the first complete translation of the into English, but it must not be supposed that before Wycliff's time the Scriptures had been altogether out of reach of the simple man with no understanding of Latin. It should be remembered that, in the Middle Ages, every one who could read, could read Latin. Before the era of the printing press translations were not as necessary as they are today."

"Christianity is a revolutionary religion or it is nothing."

"In the early years of the eleventh century the . , the father of , deposed three popes, no man saying him nay. The removal of the right of election from the Roman nobility to the , however, brought to an end an system under which it was the Emperor who really decided who should sit on the papal throne, and was determined that lesser ecclesiastical appointments should also be taken out his hand. In the complicated feudal system, bishops and abbots often held their lands as the vassals of a suzerain lord, compounding for the military service demanded from lay vassals. It was the habit, too, of the pious to endow monasteries and churches on the condition that they held the patronage. And, in one way and another, the noble, the prince, and the emperor claimed the right of ecclesiastical investiture which in effect meant the right of nomination to the offices of the Church. This lay patronage naturally led to simony, and it was the fashion for rich abbeys and attractive bishoprics to be sold to the highest bidder, to the scandal of the faithful and the hindrance of the work of the Church."

"There grew a lowly flower by Eden-gate Among the thorns and thistles. High the palm Branch’d o’er her, and imperial by her side Upstood the sunburnt lily of the East.The goodly gate swung oft, with many gods Going and coming, and the spice-winds blew Music and murmurings, and paradise Well’d over and enrich’d the outer wild.Then the palm trembled fast-bound by the feet, And the imperial Lily bow’d her down With yearning, but they could not enter in.The lowly flower she look’d up to the palm And lily, and at eve was full of dews, And hung her head and wept and said, 'Ah these Are tall and fair, and shall I enter in?'There came an angel to the gate at even, A weary angel, with dishevell'd hair; For he had wander'd far, and as he went, The blossoms of his crown fell one by one Thro' many nights, and seem'd a falling star.He saw the lovely flower by Eden-gate, And cried, 'Ah, pure and beautiful!' and turn'd And stoop'd to her and wound her in his hair, And in his golden hair she enter'd in.Husband! I was the weed at Eden-gate; I look'd up to the lily and the palm Above me, and I wept and said, 'Ah these Are tall and fair, and shall I enter in?'And one came by me to the gate at even, And stoop'd to me and wound me in his hair And in his golden hair I enter'd in."

"Ten heads and twenty hearts! so that this me, Having more room and verge, and striking less The cage that galls us into consciousness, Might drown the rings and ripples of to be In the smooth deep of being: plenary Round hours; great days, as if two days should press Together, and their wine-press’d night accresce The next night to so dead a parody Of death as cures such living: of these ordain My years; of those large years grant me not seven, Nor seventy, no, nor only seventy sevens! And then, perhaps, I might stand well in even This rain of things; down-rain, up-rain, side-rain; This rain from Earth and Ocean, air and heaven, And from the Heaven within the Heaven of Heavens."

"Every decade has its standards, idols, aversions and neglects. The Preraphaelite has succeeded to the so-called Spasmodic, as the Spasmodic flashed for a season across the Tennysonian, as the Tennysonian superseded the Byronic school. This is not the place to attempt to estimate the import of these changes in the history of Art; but they testify to the shortness of our memories. Our wish is to be permitted briefly to direct attention to some of the attributes of a character which, more steadfast than fashions, stronger than suffering, and superior to the frustration of unselfish ambitions, has left to all within the range of its influence a noble example of an English life."

"Little in human schules have I beene; My colledge is all carpeted with greene, And archèd with a. roof of spangled blue, My Hippocrcrene is the early dewe, My seate turf-piled is dight with faery sheene, My table some old stone no handes did hewe, Or twisted roote of oake or classicke beech. My servitor, the sweetly spoken breeze, Strange unwritte books doth bringe me one by one. Well pleased I make and take my own degree, Master of many arts no schule can teach; My colledge hath no termes. Its doctors are Righte eloquent sweet flow'res and whisperinge trees, Whereof the winde takes counselle; everie star That discourseth all nighte with silent speeche; Greye leverende hilles with foreheads bare with age, Great stormes that argue sternlie each with each When woods chant anthems, and a streame or two For work-day musicke."

"We get well-funded public services, they get saved from the consequences of their own hubris. What's not to like?"

"We would ask the BBC to explain why someone who defended the desecration of a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has been invited to speak on a programme about the rise of the Nazis. Given the outrage her comments have caused, the invitation by the programme makers seems both insensitive and provocative."

"If the super-rich can spend £250,000 on vanity jaunts 2.4 miles beneath the ocean then they’re not being taxed enough."

"Mama Sarkar didn't raise a diplomat."

"[Asked what makes her tick?] Petty vengeance and hopefulness."

"I'm literally a communist, you idiot."

"No ones saying that Jewish people don’t experience racism. That’s obviously true, especially online. But unlike me, you can *also* benefit from white privilege."

"The white British population has decreased by 600,000, while the minority population has increased by 1.2 million. So yes, lads, we're winning!"

"The unfortunate truth is that, sometimes, the only thing that separates an anonymous troll and a journalist is a byline. Some of the worst abuse I’ve received is either from journalists or the direct consequence of their actions in spreading misinformation about me."

"The Titanic submarine is a modern morality tale of what happens when you have too much money, and the grotesque inequality of sympathy, attention and aid for those without it."

"I'm on Team Hate."

"Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory."

"Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality are inseparable."

"Whatever shape his ideas would have taken, the book on Blake makes one thing probable. They would have been uncovenanted. He was not in a mood to settle. A Life of Dissent is the affecting film Tariq Ali made of Edward and Dorothy Thompson earlier this year, recently re-shown. While it was being shot, there was talk of mutual acquaintances. ‘What’s Perry up to these days?’, he enquired. Tariq mentioned something I’d written on conservatism. ‘Yes, I know,’ Edward replied. ‘Oakeshott was a scoundrel. Tell him to stiffen his tone.’"

"By one road or another, by conviction, by its supposed inevitability, by its alleged success, or even quite unreflectively, almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist."

"For if their association was void of purpose, why should individual agents ever accept a public authority at all? In Oakeshott's construction, government without goal yields what looks very much like an état gratuit. His famous image of politics – a vessel endlessly ploughing the sea, without port or destination – is all too apt. For why then should any passengers want to board the ship in the first place? Oakeshott attempted to answer the question with another analogy, formally more developed, actually yet more extravagant, in On Human Conduct. Subscription to civil association was entirely non-instrumental. But a non-instrumental practice – acts performed for their own sake, not for ulterior ends – was the definition of moral conduct. It might seem from this as if Oakeshott, having dismissed any prudential case for the civil condition, was going to give his will-less state an ethical foundation. But this would be an illusion. For what Oakeshott proceeds to identify as a morality is a 'colloquial idiom' of conduct, spoken with varying degrees of skill and verbal style by different speakers. Civil association, in other words, is actually modelled on language rather than dictated by virtue."

"Michael Oakeshott, all things considered, is probably the greatest living philosopher. He is certainly the greatest in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Burke, or even (the geometrically-minded might claim) since Hobbes. Oakeshott has a foot in both the aforementioned camps. He is a notable Hobbesian, yet his formal "myth" or theoretical system is perhaps best understood as (what he may even have meant it to be) a disposable scaffolding behind which its outward antithesis, a solid Burkean pragmatism, has steadily been taking a shape fit for intellectual habitation. Oakeshott, indeed, has often been likened to Burke (to whom, however, I can recall only two passing references in his works). His practical relevance, accordingly, is considerable. But above all he has created a complete world of imagination, a poetic vision of great scope, depth, and power. It contains, I believe, major, and perplexing, inconsistencies. But he is, nevertheless, a matchlessly civilised mind, to whom one constantly returns for stimulus and invigoration."

"Oakeshott was not without illusions of his own. He was able to disparage ideology because he believed tradition contained all that was needed for politics; he could not conceive of a situation in which a traditional way of doing politics was no longer possible. Yet that has been the situation in which the Conservative Party has found itself over the past generation."