Journalists From England

"... , years before he died, was hidden from most of us in the mist of his own method."

"" Instinct," as said, " is a great matter "; but it is not the whole. believes so much in domination and antagonism that he seems not to believe in men and women—the first act of faith that God requires of the artist."

"They kept a bird— Poor bird !—in a cage ; Till—so I have heard— Without need, without rage, Cheerfully, coldly, They let it flit, And more than boldly Murdered it. Since the law of nature Is danger and pain, The obedient creature Did not complain, But left as token to everybody The wing broken And the breast bloody."

"The civilisation and social structure of our country, rightly or wrongly, take for granted that a few people shall have a lot of money and a lot of power, and great many people very little money and very little power. But the individuals, and particularly the labouring individuals, who create and compose our civilisation and society, are beginning to cease to take this state of things for granted."

"... On several occasions I have seen a cuckoo mobbed by small birds, and it would be pleasant to think it was done as a protest on the part of decent bird-society against a disgusting anti-social parasite. But the probability is that they mistake the cuckoo for a hawk."

"... Where fresh water and salt water mingle, two s are busy feeding. They run to and fro, taking little steps with their wings ups, bobbing quaintly and ing low. If , who's bright and innocent beauty has something bird-like in it, wants a Gull's Dance, she should come to these shining sands to learn it. There goes a on the point all the way, light and elusive—what a mistress of technique! The choregraphy of sea-beaches is as yet unexplored; it is quite beyond the sultry, land-locked imagination of ."

"There is no greater literary sin than the omission of an Index, and, if I had my way, even novels would be provided with charts of this kind to their multifarious contents—how convenient it wold be for readers, as well as reviewers, to have such a handy means of checking the emotions of 's quick-change heroines and the involved relationships, business and otherwise, or Mr. Galsworthy's , who increase in number and variety with each successive installment of his epic of property!"

"Athens became the capital of , the clearing-house of religions and moral ideas, whatever their source."

"The spirit of the work of Hippocrates and his disciples, perhaps the noblest manifestation of the Greek concept of man's duty to man, is expressed in the "" ... If Hippocrates had done nothing more in his laborious life-time than formulate this ideal of the good physician's duty to suffering humanity, he would yet be among our greatest benefactors."

"In an age when the worst of sinners implicitly accepted the teaching of the , what we now regard as "honest doubt" was universally looked on as a sort of leprosy of the soul, a monstrous and highly infectious plague. The heretic was a germ-carrier to be ruthlessly routed out; the more virtuous his life, the more conspicuous his zeal for truth-seeking, the greater the danger of his example to the community. So the philosopher, who was not a theological first and last was apt to fall into bad odor with the conservative churchmen such as , who distrusted the study of logic and protested against any attempt to understand the mysteries of the Faith. , however, who was afterwards , thought that heresy must be fought by its own weapons, and he sought with much success the "necessary reasons" underlying the tenets of the Church concerning the nature of and His relations with his creatures."

"Whenever a , or, for that matter, any indoor diversion, becomes too serious and scientific for the average mind it soon ceases to be fashionable. Whenever the professional cuts in, the man-of-the-word cuts off—to seek some new diversion which does not require its votaries to study a shelf-full of text-books."

"... the discoveries, rich and romantic and utterly unexpected as they were, have given the North-West a world-wide advertisement of inestimable value. And this is an age of advertisement. Public opinion about such discoveries always passes through two stages—a period of universal credulity, followed by a period of universal incredulity."

"... Married people are in a position to make the closest study of one another's predilections, yet it is well known that many a marriage has been marred, or even unmade, by incompatibility of s."

"An affection for animal life was one of 's earliest characteristics. One of the rooms on the second floor was set apart as his den, and here he would sit of an evening, pondering his verses. One night, as he leant from the window, he heard an owl hooting; and, with a faculty for imitation which was strong in him, he cried back to the bird. The poet's 'tu-whit, tu-whoo' was so natural that the owl flew to the wind, and into the room, where it was captured and kept for a long while as a pet. Ingenuity has traced to this story the origin of the later poem 'The Owl,' which catches with singular fidelity an echo of the bird's cry."

"The summer of 1855, when next the were in London, was one of uncommon literary agitation. ... ... Above all other books, was the poem of the year. When the Brownings reached London, the critical bombardment of had begun; and all the various passions of mankind were being exercised in his condemnation and defence."

"To begin with, in the amusement nearest my heart, there was the theatre; and no one with a passion for the play could have arrived at Oxford in a more favourable hour. In the month of my first term the long struggle for the drama at Oxford was crowned with success; and the opened its doors to a performance of Twelfth Night by the ..."

"As the tides of history have ebbed and flowed, different drinks have come to prominence in different times, places, and cultures, from villages to ancient Greek dining rooms or s. Each one became popular when it met a particular need or aligned with a historical trend; in some cases, it then went on to influence the course of history in unexpected ways. Just as archaeologists divide history into different periods based on the use of different materials—the stone age, the , the , and so on—it is also possible to divide world history into periods dominated by different drinks. Six beverages in particular—beer, wine, , coffee, tea, and —chart the flow of world history. Three contain , and three contain , but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day."

"During Queen Victoria's reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its uses with a deluge of information. ... The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the ."

"... Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a catalyst of social transformation, societal organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. From prehistory to the present, the stories of these transformations form a narrative that encompasses the whole of human history. Food's first transformative role was as a foundation for entire civilizations. The adoption of agriculture made possible new settled lifestyles and set mankind on the path to the modern world. But the staple crops that supported the first civilizations— and in the Near East, and in Asia, and maize and potatoes in the Americas—were not simply discovered by chance. Instead, they emerged through a complex process of , as desirable traits were selected and propagated by early farmers. These staple crops are, in effect, inventions: deliberately cultivated technologies that only exist as a result of human intervention."

"We've been caught out in the past by unexpected exhaust products from transport infrastructure. First it was horse manure, then it was CO². This time it's data. We must not make the same mistake again!"

"This is Tom Standage's third pocket-sized book delving into the history of science and engineering, and yet again he has found a subject that is not only fascinating, but which also resonates with contemporary issues. In ', Standage explored the development of the telegraph, which permitted long-distance instantaneous communication for the first time. … In The Neptune File , Standage explained how in the 19th century a new unseen planet was discovered because of its gravitational tugging, which caused Uranus to deviate from its predicted path. … Now we have The Mechanical Turk, the story of the 18th-century automaton that convinced everyone that a machine could play world-class chess, a feat that was only truly achieved in the last decade. Standage reveals how our ancestors reacted to this first apparent example of artificial intelligence. He explains how the machine actually worked, and he brings us up to date with the terrible moment when a computer beat , the world chess champion."

"When hackney carriages were first introduced into London — these were the first carriages that you could hail in the streets — so, basically taxis — this led to a massive backlash from .. the incumbent providers of rides in London— who were the . And that was how you used to get around London. You would hail a boat by the river and say “I want to go to ” or “I want to go up to ”. And so they all complained and they said their profits were running away on wheels, because these hackney carriages had showed up."

"I have heard Dickens described by those who knew him as aggressive, imperious, and intolerant, and I can comprehend the accusation; but to me his temper was always of the sweetest and kindest. He would, I doubt not, have been easily bored, and would not have scrupled to show it; but he never ran the risk. He was imperious in the sense that his life was conducted on the sic vole sic jubeo principle, and that everything gave way before him."

"... No one succeeds better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat according to his cloth. Here he flattered the aristocracy; but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Washington became the idol of his worship, the "" the object of his bitterest attacks. These last-named lectures have been dead failures in England, though as literary compositions they are most excellent."

"Dickens took great interest in theatrical affairs, and was very fond of theatrical society. He had a lifelong affection for , and a great regard for and ; of the latter he said once to me, "He has the brain of a man, combined with that strange power of arriving, without knowing how or why, at the truth, which one usually finds only in a woman." He had also a liking for , , , , and the . He saw most of the pieces which were produced from time to time, but he delighted in the irregular drama, the shows and booths and circuses."

"... in collaboration with Harrington I wrote an entertainment for Mr. George Case, a well-known musical man and player of the concertina, who retired from the orchestra on his marriage with a Miss Grace Egerton, a pretty and uncommonly sprightly and clever little actress, who ought to have done better things. In buying a pair of horses from a dealer, the experienced purchaser is generally aware that he will become the owner of a good animal and a bad one, and the writer of entertainments for a married couple is very often in an analogous position."

"But far the best of all these panoramic shows was the series exhibited at the in , called "The Overland Route," and representing all the principal places between Southampton and Calcutta. This was the work of those admirable scene-painters, and William Telbin, and was executed in their painting-rooms in , , a notorious thieves' quarter. The human figures were by , the animals by and . Such a combination of excellence had never seen, and a clear, concise, and most pleasantly delivered descriptive comment on the passing scene by , an author and journalist of the day, enhanced the success, which was tremendous."

"In those days, too, we used to lunch at places which seem entirely to have disappeared. The is not so frequently met with as it was thirty years ago. The "alehouses" were, in fact, small shops fitted with a and a counter; they had been established by Mr. Crowley, a brewer of , on finding the difficulty of procuring ordinary public-houses for the sake of his beer; and at them was sold nothing but beer, es, bread and cheese, but all of the very best."

"I look back to the six years which I passed at the with very little pleasure. The headmaster, Dr. Dyne was a capable pedagogue enough, not more than usually narrow-minded, priggish, and conventional. He was a type of the old-fashioned pedantic school, which looked upon Oxford as the "hub of the universe," thought the study of Latin and the primary object of our creation, despised modern languages and foreign countries, and believed thoroughly in the virtues of corporal punishment."

"Seriously, Frank Churchill, it's time you began to look after a wife. In our profession, especially, it's the greatest blessing to have some one to care for and to be petted by in the intervals of business-strife. There used to be a notion that a literary man required to be perpetually 'seeing life,' which meant 'getting drunk, and never going home;' but that's exploded, and I believe that our best character-painters owe half their powers of delineation to their wives' suggestions. Women,—by Jove sir!—women read character wonderfully."

"Gone is , with its very wide open pens and cattle-hutches; and gone with it is a good deal of the scandal of driving the wretched beasts through the streets, and whacking and torturing them in the most dreadful fashion. Enormous hordes of cattle for Smithfield Monday market, then—not as now, sent up by rail, bur driven long tedious journeys—used to arrive at on the Saturday, and pass the Sunday in the fields let out for the purpose."

"I gave my life for freedom—This I know: For those who bade me fight had told me so."

"How odd Of God To choose The Jews."

"Smart soldiers like to be well tightened in: Loose habits would destroy all discipline."

"My dog, who picks up everything one teaches, Has got "three heads," like Mr. Gladstone's speeches, But, as might naturally be expected, His are considerably more connected."

"Life's too short for chess."

"Love levels all,—it elevates the clown, And often brings the fattest people down."

"The least drop in the world I do not mind: "Cognac"'s a noun I never yet declin'd."

"This gardener's rule applies to youth and age, When young sow wild oats, but when old grow sage."

"What I mean by reading is not skimming, not being able to say as the world saith, "Oh, yes, I've read that!," but reading again and again, in all sorts of moods, with an increase of delight every time, till the thing read has become a part of your system and goes forth along with you to meet any new experience you may have."

"Mr. Montague has written a very fine book. He has extenuated nothing and set down nothing in malice. I have seen no book about the war so temperate or so human. He was in the war, and being a man of fine intelligence must have suffered more than most from the fools from whom men then had to suffer, but the book is without any littleness or bitterness.... It is one of the very best of the books which have been written about the war."

"It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again."

"War hath no fury like a non-combatant."

"All of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about “the public school spirit”, our gallant, robust contempt for “swats” and “smugs” and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will – we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see it again – a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps of twenty thousand men."

"We all see more of architecture than of any other art. Every street is a gallery of architects’ work, and in most streets, whatever their age, there is good work and bad. Through these amusing shows many of us walk unperceivingly, all our days, like illiterates in a library, so richly does the fashionable education provide us with blind sides ."

"Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used to keep your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of some more innocent person."

"The true delight of travel, the one that is going to print itself unaccountably and indelibly on you, seems to prefer to come as a thief in the night, and not at the hours you specially fix for its entertainment."

"Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth."

"Erratum. In my article on the price of milk, 'horses' should have read 'cows' throughout."

"The man with the false nose had gone to that bourne from which no hollingsworth returns."