Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, Twelve Books, New York, 2010. (Preface Copyright 2011).

“Do note aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible.” Pindar: Pythian iii. (Prefae, xi)

I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. (xiii)

…moist devotional literature… (xiii)

I have spent much of the past year registering myself as an experimental subject for various clinical trials and “protocols,” mainly genome-based and aimed at enlarging human knowledge and shrinking the area of darkness and terror where cancer holds dominion. My aim here is obviously not quite disinterested, but many of the experiments are at a stage where any result will be too far in the future to be of help to me. In this book I cite Horace Mann’s injunction: “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” So this is a modest and slight response to his challenge, to be sure, but my own. The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason. (xiv)

Should the best efforts of my physician friends be unavailing, I possess a fairly clear idea of how Stage Four esophageal cancer harvests its victims. The terminal process doesn’t allow for much in the way of “activity,” or even of composed farewells, let alone Stoic or Socratic departures. This is why I am so grateful to have had, already, a lucid interval of some length, and to have filled it with the same elements, of friendship and love, and literature and the dialectic, with which… (xiv)

Before me is a handsome edition of Face to Face … The page that has caught and held my eye is… (1)

It was decidedly interesting to have become actuarially extinct… (5)

Valletta, the capital of the tiny island-state of Malta and one of the finest Baroque and Renaissance cities of Europe. A jewel set in the sea between Sicily and Libya, … Maltese tongue is a dialect version of the Arabic spoken … If you happen to attend a Maltese Catholic church during Mass, you will see the priest raising the Communion Host and calling on “Allah,” because this after all is the local word for “god.” (10)

…I am standing on the deck of this vessel in company with my mother, who holds my hand when I desire it and also lets me scamper off to explore if I insist. (10)

…elementary phonetic reading-book… This concerned the tedious adventures of… (11)

But she and my father had first been thrown together precisely because of drizzle and austerity, and the grim, grinding war against the Nazis. (12)

…she escorted me to my boarding school at the age of eight. (13)

…from the ages of eight to eighteen I was to be away from home for most of the year and the crucial rites of passage, from the pains of sexual maturity to the acquisition of friends, enemies, and an education, took place outside the bonds of family. (13)

mother… she had two books of finely bound poetry apart from the MacNeice (Rupert Brooke, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), which I will die to save even if my house burns down. (16)

…the bogus refulgences of Kahlil Gibran and the sickly tautologies of the The Prophet. (18)

Both he and she were now devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: the sinister windbag who had brought enlightenment to the Beatles in the summer of love. (19)

A second-to-last piece of wretchedness almost completes this episode. Whenever I hear the dull word “closure,” I am made to realize that I, at least, will never achieve it. This is because the Athens police made me look at a photograph of Yvonne as she had been discovered. I will tell you nothing about this except that the scene was decent and peaceful but that the was off the bed and on the floor, and that the bedside telephone had been dislodged from its cradle. It’s impossible to “read” this bit of forensics with certainty, but I shall always have to wonder if she had briefly regained consciousness, or perhaps even belatedly regretted her choice, and tried at the very last to stay alive. (25)

I have intermittently sunk myself, over the house of the past four decades or so, into dismal attempts to imagine or think or “feel” myself into my mother’s state of mind as she decided that the remainder of her life would simply not be worth living. There is a considerable literature on the subject, which I have made an effort to scrutinize, but all of it has seemed to me too portentous and general and sociological to be of much help. (26)

This is almost exactly what William Styron once told me in a greasy diner in Hartford, Connecticut, about a golden moment in Paris when he had been waiting to be given a large cash prize, an emblazoned ribbon and medal of literary achievement and a handsome dinner to which all his friends had been bidden. “I looked longingly across the lobby at the street. And I mean longingly. I thought, if I could just hurl myself through those heavy revolving doors I might get myself under the wheels of that merciful bus. And then the agony could stop.” (29)

Of the two notes that she left, one (which pardon me, I do not mean to quote) was to me. (31)

Alcohol for me has been an aspect of my optimism: the mood caught by Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited when he discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian and claims that he at lest chooses to drink “in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it.” (35)

[apropos of nothing] I do have a heroic memory of him from my boyhood, and it happens to concern water. (39)

The golf game must have taken place when I was about thirteen. … We had a round of nine holes that somehow went well for both of us, and then he treated me to a heavy “tea” in the clubhouse where, if nothing much got said, there was no tension or awkwardness, either. (40)

[for father’s funeral] I was able to see my father in his last repose before the screwing-on of the lid, and later to do for him what he had once done for me, and carry him on my shoulders. … I rather pity those Anglo-American families to whom the “Navy Hymn” is not a part of the emotional furniture: its words and music are impossibly stirring. … My own text was from that same Paul of Tarsus, and form his Epistle to the Philippians, which I select for its non-religious yet high moral character: /
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. … Philippians 4:8. (45-6)

I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I have ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass (I must have been attempting some adolescent version of the aesthetic), he almost barked: “What is this? Luxury?” That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood. (46)

Meanwhile, and speaking of books, the school possessed its very own library, and several of the masters had private collections of their own, to which one might be admitted (not always without risk to these men’s immortal souls) as a great treat. (52)

Having at that stage only cropped and grazed on the lower slopes of Wordsworthian verse, (58)

Thus I have to be honest and say that the single book that most altered my life was How Green Was My Valley… In the next few years I inhaled and imbibed it dozens of times and could at any moment have sat for an examination on its major and minor themes. (60)

Most English public schools are affiliated with the national absurdity of the Anglican or “Church of England” confession (as if there could be a version of Christianity specifically linked to a group of northerly island), whereas The Leys was Methodist, which put it in the Dissenting or Nonconformist tradition, founded by that admitted maniac and demagogue John Wesley but still better than the alliance between a state church, the monarchy, the armed forces, and the Tory Party. (64)

Oxford-Cambridge… In days gone by, plebian Londoners… loud public disputes every year… Boat Race… one of the great “who cares?” events of any epoch. (64)

Some say that Cambridge is more austere and Oxford more louche and luxurious, … (64)

They used to say that Cambridge was better at “science”; (65)

We were taught the poetry of Owen and Auden at school, and allowed to ruminate on the obsession of Owen with wounded and bleeding young soldiers, as well as on the cunning way in which Auden opened “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love/ Human on My Faithless Arm.” … but I don’t think any instructor was sufficiently phlegmatic to break the news that the two great English poets of the preceding two generations had been quite so gay. (74)

I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned. [From King Lear: ‘Thou rascal beadle, holy thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? … Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind, for which thou whip’st her.” ] / I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their own ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place. (78)

A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. (81)

…very striking carriage and appearance… (90)

[‘Chris’] And yet, to that son’s chosen brothers and sisters of the Labour and socialist movement, it was a part of the warmth and fraternity—part of one’s very acceptance—that the informal version be adopted without any further permission or ado. (94)

senescent: Growing old. Characteristic of old age. Related to senile. Senescence refers to changes in the body after it reaches its maturity.

Oxford … At gatherings of the “History Workshop,” held on Ruskin’s grounds and in nearby alehouses, I heard E.P. Thompson deliver an impromptu lecture on the “Enclosures” of common land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which he brought an otherwise unsentimental audience to tears with his recitation of the poems of John Clare. (101)

…his meek, modest appearance always made him a special target for the rough attentions of the police. (101)

One evening I was placed next to that great Cornish queen A. L. Rowse, who had only recently unburdened himself of a new gay theory of the origin and dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets but mainly wanted to tell me what I already knew, that Hitchens was a Cornish name, and positively demanded to be told whether the Mrs. Hitchens who kept sending him such fervent and unwanted love letters was by any chance my mothers. He was so lost in conceit that he did not, I remember thinking, completely trust my denial. (105)

…Magaziner (later the man to ruin American health care on behalf of Hillary Clinton) (107)

...girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, …(107)

He left the ministry and quite some time later got married, at which point the Catholic Church excommunicated him because he had violated his vows as a priest! Many people don’t understand that the term “lapsed Catholic” entails the sinister implication that only the Church can decide who leaves it and why, or when. (108)

…it would not of course be possible or desirable to attempt any attacks or satires on the Leader of the Revolution himself. But otherwise, the freedom of conscience and creativity was absolute. … I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. (117)

People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does form the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question form the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. (121)

…if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone. I was actually a bit more confident on the platform than I was in the sack, and I can remember losing my virginity—a bit later than most of my peers, I suspect—with a girl who, inviting me to tea at one of the then–segregated female colleges, allowed me to notice that her walls were covered with photographs taken of me by an unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady… (124)

“You’re a friend of young Fenton’s, then?” he said gruffly. I allowed as much. (128)

[starting a new paragraph with: ] I can justify this if you like. (142)

A very sudden bang convinced me that a nail bomb had been thrown at a British patrol, … Instead, I nearly ended it as a bloody fool who tested the patience of the British Army. Rising too soon from my semi-recumbent posture, I found myself slammed against the wall by a squad of soldiers with blackened faces, and asked various urgent questions that were larded with terse remarks about the many shortcomings of the Irish. Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. (148)

Recumbent: lying down, suggestive of repose, as in a therapy couch.

…a decent if not sumptuous menu. (149)

Driberg developed a fondness for me which I don’t think was especially sexual. He would “try” any male person at least once, on the principle that you never know your luck, … I once had to cancel a dinner engagement with him and, being asked rather querulously why this was, replied that my girlfriend was in the hospital for some tests and that I wanted to visit her after work. “Ah, yes,” said Tom with every apparent effort at solicitude, “there’s a lot to go wrong with them, isn’t there? I do so hope that it isn’t her clitoris or anything ghastly like that.” Not all of this was by any means affectation. For Tom, the entire notion of heterosexual intercourse was gruesome to the last degree. (“That awful wound, my dear Christopher. I just don’t see how you can.” (152-3)

…I was very aware that my roadworthiness (Martin prefers the term “seaworthiness”) in real grown-up company was not to be assumed. (156)

…everybody has at one point seen man standing in front of the pornography section, in either a magazine store or a video emporium, but it was Martin who observed these swaying and muttering figures pulling out and then replacing the contents and compared it to “the Wailing Wall.” (158)

[note] So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift—enviable if potentially time consuming—of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it. (159)

The words “ruggedly handsome features” appear on the first page of Nineteen Eighty-four and for a while Martin declined to go any further into the book. (“The man can’t write worth a damn.”) (160)

[note] But the more Martin absorbed himself in the man’s work, the more it was borne in on him that the recurrent twelve-year-old-girl theme in Nabokov’s writings was something more alarming and disturbing than a daring literary one-off. See, for his stern register of this disquieting business, the Guardian 14 November 2009. (161)

[Martin] I remember sitting quietly while he talked with authority about why Jane Austen was not all that good. [note: I write this in a week where I have been re-reading Northanger Abbey, and reflecting once again on the sheer justice of Kingsley’s verdict on Miss Austen’s “inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major.”] (163)

…a perfectly foul establishment… (167)

Clive James wrote… “Here is a book so dull that … If it were to be read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky.” (172)

I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting form the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I though Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. … Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a denial of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it chances) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. Btu she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order-paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!” / I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. (178)

But, if you exempt a solitary trip that I took to express support for the Icelandic socialists who were fighting to stop British trawlers from hovering up all their fish (and Iceland is an exotic locale all of its own, with its moonscape interior and geyser-supplied hot water with the ever-present diabolical whiff of sulphur), (179)

Christmas of 1976. The previous summer I had been very intrigued by reports of a small-scale but suggestive workers’ revolt in Communist Poland, … (187)

…a dingy Russian-backed Communist bureaucracy sitting atop a sullen and strongly Catholic people who perhaps only agreed with their rulers in distrusting Federal Germany. (An old national chestnut asks the question: If the Russians and the Germans both attack again, who do you shoot first? Answer: “The Germans. Business Before Pleasure.” You can also deduce something about a Pole who answers this question the other way around.) (188)

Rabbi Tarfon says somewhere that the task can never be quite completed, yet one has no right to give it up. Of the comrades I met that bleak winter, many of them veterans of the extremely nasty Polish prison system, none really expected to make more than a small dent in the regime. (188)

On the macro scale, it was still officially “true” that the mass graves of Katyn, across the Belarus border, in which the corpses of tens of thousands of Polish officers had been hastily interred in the 1940s, were the responsibility of the Nazis. But there simply wasn’t a single person in the whole of Poland who credited this disgusting untruth. Not even those paid to spread it believed it. (189)

Warsaw… As an interpreter he provided us with the lovely Barbara Kopec, who held down a daytime job in the “Palace of Culture” that dominated the main square of the city. It had been built as a personal gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland, and in its form and shape expressed all the good taste and goodwill that such benevolence might have implied. It wasn’t much fun working inside the building, as Barbara remarked, but at least it meant she didn’t have to look at the damn thing. (189)

Anti-semitism… It would have been even nastier if Jacek Kuron had actually been Jewish, but the fact is that he wasn’t: Polish and other Jew-baiters have been known to operate without possessing the raw material of any actual Jews to “work” with. (190)

…there was heavy snow that Christmas, and I found the icy city rather hypnotizing. We went to the nearby township of Kazimierc, once a center of Jewish life before the nearly “clean” sweep that had been made of Polish Jewry. We attended a midnight Mass in Vilanow, where the congregation was so densely packed that it spilled out of doors, with worshippers kneeling in the drifts. (190)

…one of the strikes in the port city of Strettin had been provoked when the shipyard workers read in the Communist Party paper that they had all “volunteered” to work longer hours in the interests of production. One of the leaders of that strike, a man named Edmund Baluka, later told me that he had been sent as a soldier into Czechoslovakia during the Warsaw Pact aggression of August 1968. He had been told, and had believed, that he was going to repel a West German invasion of Prague. Discovering a complete absence of Germans in the country—except for East Germans soliders who were also taking part in the Russian-sponsored occupation—had destroyed his entire faith in anything the Party ever said. (191)

[Timerman] I borrow Jacobo’s words here because they are crystalline authentic and because my own would be no good: Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity. (197)

Borges: … He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. “You will remember,” he said, “the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.” And he then recited the following:
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—“Inclusiveness”—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. (199)

On top of this, I was becoming increasingly aware that that other old Tory, Dr. Samuel Johnson, had been quite wrong when he pronounced that a man who was tired of London was tired of life. With me, it was if anything the reverse. If I was ever going, it was time for me to go. (203)

Such an impression wasn’t corrected even by reading Mark Twain, who was presented to us as a children’s writer only and who seemed to be depicting conditions of near-primeval backwardness, … (207)

…I had to agree that the picture of New York wasn’t a very alluring one at that. America seemed either too modern, with no castles or cathedrals and no sense of history, or simply too premodern with too much wilderness and unpolished conduct. (208)

A colleague of my father’s had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came for ma place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone…) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. (208)

Yet when I had been to hear W.H. Auden recite his poems at Great St. Mary’s Church in 1966, I had noticed that he closed with the words “God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.” … I couldn’t quite square this at first with my revulsion from the America of drawling and snarling accents, and cheap fizzy softdrinks and turbocharged war and racism. (209)

…made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. (212)

…the foul cocktail known as a “Manhattan” … (220)

…I became the tenant of a walk-up on East Tenth Street, on the north side of Tompkins Square, … (228)

Ronald Reagan… I can easily remember…exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. … “The Russian language contains no word for ‘freedom’” was another stupefying pronouncement of his: … (232)

rebarbative : 1890-5, fearsome, forbidding, repelling, unattractive. Derived from an old French word which referred to two bearded men face to face in conflict.

…I came to appreciate that I couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t afford their leafy neighborhoods of the Northwest. I found a row house in northeast Capitol Hill, where if I wanted to cab it home late at night from Dupont Circle, African-born taxi drivers would sometimes decline to take me (on the unarguable—at least by me with them—grounds that it was “a black area). I have never since beenable to use the word “gentrification” as a sneer: the unavoidable truth is that it’s almost invariably a good symptom. (236)

…the stubborn American belief that “hot tea” is made with lukewarm or formerly boiled water… (239)

Speaking of airplanes… on a day in early September 2001 I got up at a decent hour on a morning that simply had to be described as golden and crisp, went out through the blazingly autumnal Virginia woods to Dulles Airport and boarded a flight to Seattle. … I shook a lot of hands, kissed a few cheeks, signed quite a number of my Kissinger books, and retired (as Lord Rochester once said, as if breaking the rule of a lifetime) “early, sober, and alone.” (241)

…often contented themselves with inexpensive, unserious remarks about American machismo or Bush’s “cowboy” style. (249)

…amendments abolishing the established church, postulating an armed people, opposing the… (252)

…the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan… (263)

At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity, a black-winged ghoul came flapping back form exile on a French jet… (266)

Edward Said… It was Western presumption, he argued, to regard Islam as a problem of backwardness. It led to our first major disagreement, … (267)

Salman… He looked at me and lowered his very heavy lids: these later became so heavy that they needed a slight surgical correction but in those days he could adopt the gaze of what Martin unforgettably called “a falcon looking through a Venetian blind.” This meant his attention was engaged. (275)

At lunch afterward, Salman had talked in an unstoppably poetic way about all matters Shakespearean: unstoppable in the sense that nobody present wanted to stop him. … I soon enough realized when young that did not have the true “stuff” for fiction and poetry. … Now, listening to Salman “compose,” as it were, I suddenly wondered if this was related to my near-total inability with music, itself quite possibly [275] linked with my incapacity in chess and mathematics. Thinking quickly and checking one by one, I noticed that all my poet and novelist friends possessed at the very least some musical capacity: they could either play a little or could give a decent description of a musical event. Could it be this that marked them off from the mere essayist? I hit one iceberg-size objection right away. Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the man of all men who could make one feel embarrassed to be employing the same language (English being only his third), detested music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds… The concept piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones.” Ah, but that needn’t mean he wasn’t musical. … in the New York Public Library there rests a case of written material—“Nabokov Under Glass”—in which the great lepidopterist attempted a form of notation that could run along the top of his holographs. What is this if not a form of musicality? (276)

Crepuscular: of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim; indistinct. Zoology: appearing or active in the twilight, as certain insects or bats.
Owl Farm in Woody Creek, home of the storied Hunter Thompson. In these booze-fueled and crepuscular surroundings, in the intervals of our own midnight gunplay with rows of empty bottles… (290)

I have never been able to rid myself of the view that Bush was not really surprised to read the first reports from Kuwait—I watched him received them very calmly—and only became upset when he learned that Saddam Hussein has taken the entire country. The whole thing stank of a pre-arranged carve-up gone wrong. It was almost impossible to read the transcript of his envoy’s last meeting with Saddam and to form any other opinion. Ambassador April Glaspie, whom I had known briefly in London, explicitly told the Iraqi dictator that the United States took no position on his quarrel with the Kuwaitis. Had Saddam taken only the Rumaila oil filed and the Bubiyan and Warba islands, there would have been no casus belli. I printed the Glaspie memorandum in Harper’s magazine, along with some highly critical commentary, and made several speeches and media appearances saying that any war would be fought, in effect, on false pretenses. (290)

…the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. (296) Cull: to choose from a group (for example to choose the best verses from a poet’s work), to control or reduce the size of a group (as of a herd) by removing (or hunting) the weaker members. Pinion: to bind a person’s arms or cut a bird’s primary feathers to prevent flight.

…the subject of so much lurid invention and paranoid disinformation… (298)

I think of it whenever I hear some fools say, “All right, we agree that Saddam was a bad guy.” Nobody capable of uttering that commonplace has any conception of radical evil. (299)

Purulent: related to pus.

…my nauseating carapace. (316) Carapace (car-uh-pace) : a protective, decorative, or disguising shell.

I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here, … (321)

This made me relax fractionally, … (322)

Everyone was supposed to say something, but when John Daily took the first scoop form the urn and spread the ashes on the breeze, there was something so unutterably final in the gesture that tears seemed as natural as breathing and I wasn’t at all sure that I could go through with it. My idea had been to quote form the last scene of Macbeth, which is the only passage I know that can hope to rise to such an occasion. The tyrant and usurper has been killed, but Ross has to tell old Siward that his boy has perished in the struggle:
/
Your son, my lord, has paid a solider’s debt;
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
/
This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds: /
/
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end. (327)

…with those whose pressing need it is to … (330)

…refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (330)

the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… (331)

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction? Dennis Barlow, Humebrt Humbert, Horatio Hornblower, Jeeves, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, Funes the Memorious , Lucifer. (333)

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction? Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea, Becky Sharp, Candy, O, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia. (333)

Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner. (334)

Who are your favorite poets? Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, W. H. Auden, James Fenton, W. B. Yeats, Chidiock Tichbourne, G. K. Chesterton, Wendy Cope. (334)

…respect that I could have forfeited if I had missed—as the French so quenchingly say—a perfectly good opportunity for keeping my mouth shut. (336)

I therefore am glad that I waited as long as I did before ingesting and digesting Marcel Proust, because one has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to emark on the project of recovering lost life. (338)

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase “terrible beauty.” Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possible wish for a father who never goes away. (340)

Suicide murderers… About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. (344)

…excrement-colored capital city of Kabul, … (345)

…the eerie wretchedness and interstellar frigidity of the place… (349)

At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there. /
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. (351) Sodality: A society or an association, especially a devotional or charitable society for the laity in the Roman Catholic Church.

In what was once German Prussia, in the district of Posen and very near the border of Poland… hour’s drive form the Polish city of Wroclaw, formerly Breslau. A certain Mr. Nathaniel Blumenthal, … one of old Nate’s daughters married a certain Lionel Levin, of Liverpool (the Levins also hailing originally from the Posen/Poznan area), (354)

…always a version of the same cliché about the Jews being over-sharp in business… (358)

Some readers may already have caught their breath, I hope enviously. (360)

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the “prize” loot he has extracted form his encounters with Bonaparte’s navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away form any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love detail that Hampshire’s “New Forest” is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960’s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I’ll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. (360)

…revenant… spirit who comes back from the dead to get revenge or harass specific persons.

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. … I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to “make a new start” or be “born again”: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? (367)

In his view, it is still “Operation Reinhardt,” or the planned destructive of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, “roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.” (371)

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. … If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? (378)

Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very important one. When he laughed, it was as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure. (385)

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of “deconstruction” or “postmodernism” was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? (385-6)

Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies’ dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. “Mariam,” he said as if by way of explanation, “has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.” (388)

…but Orientalism was a book that made one think. [The best critique of it is Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West] (390)

Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance beilved that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action. (394)

Said: … American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of “Orientalism” in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. (397)

Anthony Powell’s narrator… The Pilgrim’s Progress that had stuck in both … after his aunt read the book aloud to him as a child, he could never, even after he was grown-up, watch a lone figure draw nearer across a field, without thinking that this was Apollyon come to contend with him. (402)

My younger brother, Peter—aged perhaps eight—has so strongly imbibed John Bunyan’s Puritan classic as almost to have memorized it. (403)

Damascus… Damascene moments. (406)

Susan Sontag… She wanted to have everything at least three ways and she wanted it voraciously: an evening of theater or cinema followed be a lengthy dinner at an intriguing new restaurant, with visitors from at least one new country, to be succeeded by very late-night conversation precisely so that an early start could be made in the morning. I consider myself pretty durable in these same sweepstakes but I once almost fell asleep standing up while preparing her a sofa bed in Washington after a very exhausting day of multiple meals and discussions: she had vanished to begin the next day long before I regained consciousness. (417)

…formally correct noises… (417)

Deracinate: to pull out from the roots, or culture, especially to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics from. (racine: root) uproot.

James Herrick, The History and Theory of Rhetoric

James Herrick, The History and Theory of Rhetoric, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1997.

Aristotle… emphasized a type of argument he called the enthymeme. Though scholars differ on exactly how Aristotle defined an enthymeme most will agree that it is an argument built from values, beliefs, or knowledge held in common by a speaker and an audience. In fact, Aristotle went so far as to claim that the art of rhetoric’s central concern was the enthymeme. Perhaps this was because persuasion—for Aristotle, the principle goal of rhetoric—depends on commonality between a rhetor and an audience. (9)

…in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. As historian of rhetoric John Poulakos writes, “when the Sophists appeared on the horizon of the Hellenic city-states, they found themselves in the midst of an enormous cultural change: from aristocracy to democracy.” [32] … With democratic reforms, the political life of the polis came to be managed by oratory and debate. (32-33)

An Athenian trial consisted of two speeches—one of prosecution, the other of defense—and the jury of several hundred members did not deliberate but simply voted. Testimonial evidence had to be filed with the court preceding the trial, and was simply read aloud to a gathered citizen-jury during the trial itself. … The presiding judge’s role was more that of a master of ceremonies and timekeeper than a legal expert. There were no attorneys in the modern sense of the term. … Beginning around 430 B.C. speechwriters, or logographers like the Sophist Antiphon, could be hired to write a courtroom speech… (34)

The Sophists were active in Athens and other Greek city-states from about the middle of the fifth century B.C. until the end of the fourth century. Though there never were many Sophists active at any given time, they exercised influence on the development of rhetoric and even the course of Western culture vastly out of proportion with their numbers. (35)

Plato’s influence on fourth-century Athenian culture was relatively slight, whereas oratory was central to the lives of most Athenian citizens, who regularly attended meetings of the courts or the Assembly in some capacity, even if they did not actively engage in legal or political affairs. (35)

Sophists… were also iconoclasts who questioned assumptions at the very foundation of Greek society. Sophists loved to experiment with arguments… the more shocking the better. (36)

Still, to the average Athenian some of the leading Sophists appeared to be eccentrics wrapped up in more or less irrelevant intellectual pursuits. Thus, in his famous play Clouds Aristophanes mocks the Sophists… Interestingly, the great playwright treats Socrates himself as a Sophist, though the philosopher neither presented speeches nor taught rhetoric. (36)

In the dialectical method, speeches and arguments started from statements termed endoxa, or premises that were widely believed or taken to be highly probable. For example… It is better to possess much virtue than much money… One student would develop an argument based on this claim. Another student would then challenge the argument on the basis of other widely accepted notions… The dialectical method was employed in part because the Sophists accepted the notion of dissoi logoi, or contradictory arguments. That is, Sophists believed that strong arguments could be produced for or against any claim. (37)

…epideixis, a word describing a speech prepared for a formal occasion. (37)

…we should note that Western culture has come closer to following the argumentative model set out by Sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias in the actual conduct of its affairs than that suggested by Plato of seeking truth by means of philosophical inquiry. (38)

Athenians in particular were suspicious of foreigners claiming to possess knowledge or skills that superior to those of the Athenians themselves. / The fact that they were form outside the Hellenic world and their habit of travel created a third concern about Sophists for many Greeks. The Sophists had, as the saying goes, been around, and in their travels they noted that people believe rather different things in different places. Their cultural relativism contributed directly to another reason many in Greece were suspicious of these professional pleaders and teachers of rhetoric. The Sophists, not surprisingly, developed a view of truth as relative to places and cultures. (39)

According to Sophists like Gorgias and Protagoras, truth was not to be found in transcendent sources such as gods or a Platonic realm of universal forms. Rather, Sophists believed that truth emerged form a clash of arguments. Plato repudiated such a view of truth, arguing that it was highly dangerous. In fact, the Sophists’ philosophy was even more radical than their moral relativism would suggest. John Poulakos affirms that the Sophists believed “the world could always be recreated linguistically.” That is, reality itself is a linguistic construction rather than an objective fact. … James Murphy and Richard Katula write that “knowledge was subjective and everything is precisely what the individual believes it to be.” This meant that “each of us, not necessarily human beings in the collective, decides what something means to us.” (40)

Gorgias: famous for: 1. Nothing exists. 2. If anything did exist, we could not know it. 3. If we could knot that something existed, we would not be able to communicate it to anyone else. (41)

Gorgias also adhered to a philosophy of language and knowledge that suggested that the only “reality” we have access to “lies in the human psyche, and its malleability and susceptibility” to linguistic manipulation. (Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Gorgias on Rhetoric and Poetic: A Rehabilitation,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 38 (Fall 1972): 27-38). (41)

Gorgias’s interest in the persuasive power of language drew his attention in particular to the sounds of words. … If words do not represent an external reality, then their importance is as a means of shaping a verbal reality in human thought. … florid rhyming style that strikes most modern readers as overdone. But remember, what he is after is a magical incantation to virtually hypnotize his audience, not a tight, logical proof appealing to reason. (42)

As poetry was considered in Greek lore to be of divine origin, the relationship between beautiful words and supernatural power was a more natural one for Gorgias than it is for modern readers. Gorgias believed that words worked their magic most powerfully by arousing human emotions such as fear, pity, and longing. [as opposed to working most powerfully by appeal to aesthetics of music, architecture, etc.] (42)

Gorgias’s interest in antithesis extended beyond his concern for style. Like some of the other Sophists, he held that two antithetical statements can be made on each subject, and that truth emerged from the clash of fundamentally opposed positions. The ides that truth is a product of the clash of views was, as we have seen closely related to the concept of kairos, the belief that truth is relative to circumstances. This view also reflects the Sophists’ commitment to aporia, the effort to place a claim in doubt. Once clouded in doubt, the orator’s goal was to demonstrate that one resolution of the issue was more likely than another. (43)

As we have noted, Sophists were considered less than upright citizens by many Greeks. Nevertheless, some of them had connections with very powerful people in Athens. Protagoras, for instance, was close to Pericles… (44)

Isocrates… was only ten years older than Plato… Both men studied under Socrates, and both claimed him as their model. (45)

Isocrates’ teaching was not aimed at creating clever and entertaining speakers, but rather at improving the political practices of Athens. … Isocrates also insisted on high moral character in students. This concern for ethos, or the speaker’s character, set Isocrates apart form the Sophists whose orientation was decidedly more practical. (45-6)

Heuristic: Discourse’s capacity for discovery, whether of facts, insights, or even of self-awareness. (51)

Kairos: Rhetoric’s search for relative truth rather than absolute certainty; a consideration of opposite points of view, as well as attention to such factors as time and circumstances. An opportune moment or situation. (51)

Plato… attacked the sophistic practice of rhetoric in his dialogue called Phaedrus. Sophists and their philosophy are also mentioned in Plato’s dialogues Sophist and Protagoras. (54)

The Sophists’ rhetoric, according to Plato, aimed only at persuasion about justice through the manipulation of public opinion (doxa), whereas an adequate view of justice must be grounded in true knowledge (episteme) (55)

In the course of his conversation with Gorgias, Socrates has made the surprising assertion that one who truly understands justice could never choose to do injustice. This is because to understand justice is to love it, and at the same time to recognize just how repulsive injustice is. (57)

Has Plato been fair to rhetoric and the Sophists in Gorgias? Some historians of rhetoric, like Brian Vickers, think not. Vickers notes, for instance, that though Socrates says he rejects the rhetorical way of arguing based on probabilities, witnesses, beliefs, and even ridicule, he engages in these tactic when they serve his ends. Similarly, Richard Leo Enos writes that Plato’s case in Gorgias should be viewed as “rhetorical argument of the kind associated with sophistic rhetoric.” … Enos finds the portrayal of Gorgias himself so exaggerated as to be unrecognizable. “The biased characterization of Gorgias of Leontini in Plato’s famous dialogue,” writes Enos, “was a gross misrepresentation…” (62)

Cicero… “What most surprised me about Plato in that work was that it seemed to me that as he was in the process of ridiculing rhetors he himself appeared to be the foremost rehtor.” (63)

The Sophists in Gorgias hold that rhetoric creates truth that is useful for the moment out of doxa, or the opinions of the people, through the process of argument and counterargument. … In some respects, then, Plato’s argument against rhetoric extends to any aspect of democracy (rule by the demos) (63)

If deliberative oratory dealt with questions of expedience [allocation of resources, gov’t], and forensic oratory with justice, ceremonial or epideictic oratory, then, dealt with virtue and vice. This kind of speaking played a more important role in Athens than might be immediately apparent, for it provided opportunities to reinforce important values having to do with right behavior, or to uphold virtues such as courage, honor, or honesty… Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech can be seen as an example of epideictic oratory in which King upholds the values of justice, harmony, and peace. (81)

…when a lawyer makes a case in court, the focus is not on the future, but rather on questions of past fact such as “what was done?” and “who did it?” … Forensic oratory reconstructs the past, rather than arguing about the future good of the city-state. (82)

Emotions, as Aristotle views them, are not irrational impediments to decision making. Rather, they are rational responses to certain kinds of circumstances and arguments. … “it was Aristotle’s contribution to offer a very different view of emotion, so that emotional appeal would no longer be viewed as an extra-rational enchantment.” (84)

He also notes casual fallacies such as the post hoc fallacy. This fallacy suggests that because one event followed another, the former caused the latter. (87)

Above all, a speaker must be clear. “Clearness is secured,” writes Aristotle, “by using words (nouns and verbs alike) that are current and ordinary” (1404b). Thus, a speaker must have a good ear for everyday spoken language. The effective orator should not use so many artistic devices in speaking that the speech takes on an artificial feeling, for “naturalness is persuasive.” It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Aristotle’s advice on style is in many ways a reaction against the highly stylized speaking of the Sophists. (87)

Dialectic: A method of reasoning form common opinions, directed by established principles of reasoning to probable conclusions. A logical method of debating issues of general interest, starting from widely accepted propositions. (90)

Accounts of Roman orators slapping their thighs, stamping their feet, and even ripping open their togas to reveal war wounds suggests that delivery in Rome was quite a different matter form the stolid “talking-head” approach to speaking characteristic of contemporary politicians. (98)

Judicial arguments were often arranged under two headings discussed in Cicero’s De Inventione. The first of these is called “attributes of the person,” while the second is termed “attributes of the act. … in a culture in which personal character was elevated, questions surrounding the accused person’s reputation had to be addressed. Such questions, for the Roman courtroom pleader, included “such straightforward matters as the person’s name, nature, manner of life, and the like.” Cicero writes, “we hold the following to be the attributes of the person: name, nature, manner of life, fortune, habit, feeling, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents, speeches made.” Under these divisions a judicial pleader might consider some issues that modern readers would likely find irrelevant to courtroom pleading. For example, the accused’s place of birth and nationality (nature), or even manner in which he or she was reared (manner of life) might be developed into an argument for accusation of defense. (100)

An individual’s moral character does not emerge from the words of a speech, as Aristotle suggested in making ethos a technical proof in rhetoric. This earlier Greek view suggested that moral character could be studied and used persuasively by the orator. Rather, in keeping with Roman thinking on the subject, character was a natural trait of an individual that gradually revealed itself through the course of a life. James May writes, “The Roman view is succinctly… expressed by Cicero in De Oratore: “Feelings are won over by a man’s dignity (dignitas), achievements (res gestae), and reputation (existimatio).’ Aristotle’s conception of personal character portrayed through the medium of a speech was, for the Roman orator, neither acceptable nor adequate.” (102)

In De Oratore, Cicero blames Plato for separating wisdom and eloquence in the philosopher’s famous attack on the Sophists in Gorgias. “Socrates,” writes Moroever, “this is the source form which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading us to have one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak.” Cicero sought to reunite “the tongue and the brain,” and in the process to produce great speakers who also were great thinkers. [un-American] (103)

Restricting access to rhetorical training to the select few who possessed particular traits of character and a particular moral perspective (and, we might add, certain political views), Quintillian… (108)

Quintilian taught his students to think of judicial speeches—the type with which he was most concerned—as divided into five parts, … The first part, the exordium, was an introduction designed to dispose the audience to listen to the speech. The second part, the narratio, was a statement of the facts essential to understanding the case, and intended to reveal the essential nature of the subject about which they were to render a decision. / The third part of the judicial speech was the proof or confirmatio, which was a section designed to offer evidences in support of claims advanced during the narratio. Fourth came the confutatio, or the refutation, in which couterarguments were answered. Finally the peroratio or conclusion was presented, a section in which the orator demonstrated again the full strength of the case presented. (110)

Not surprisingly, as the power of the emperors increased over against that of the Senate, the importance of rhetoric as a means of shaping policy declined. (114)

Delectare: To delight; one of Cicero’s three functions or goals of rhetoric. (117)

Docere: To teach; one of Cicero’s three functions or goals of rhetoric. (117)

Movere: To persuade or move an audience’s emotions; one of Cicero’s three functions or goals of rhetoric. (118)

Kathleen Welch writes that “it is interesting to note that On Invention was the only text of Cicero available to most of the medieval period and therefore was frequently cited during this period.” Thus, two works—De Inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium—were “the major works of Latin antiquity for Middle Ages.” (123)

As educational practices developed over the long course of the Middle Ages, an intellectual movements known as Scholasticism became dominant in parts of Europe. Scholasticism was a closed and authoritarian approach to education centered on a disputation over a fixed body of premises derived largely from the teachings of Aristotle. Scholasticism developed around the medieval tendency to treat ancient sources—both the Bible and certain texts of classical antiquity—as authoritative. So strong was this tendency that individual sentences from a respected source, even when taken our of context, could be employed to secure a point in debate. These isolated statements form ancient sources were called sententiae. Some authors collected large numbers of sententiae into anthologies for educational and disputational purposes. Disputes centered on debatable points suggested by one or more sententiae, these debatable notions being called quaestiones. (124)

…the writer who initially translated classical rhetoric into the language of the Church, Augustine of Hippo … was sent to the great Roman port of Carthage to study rhetoric as a teenage, but fell victim to the temptations of the city. He fathered a child by his mistress before he was eighteen. … The rhetoric Augustine taught was based on works by Cicero [125] … Augustine lived, believed, and taught much like a Sophist of the fifth century B.C. in Athens. Moreover, when he attacks rhetoric, as he does at points in his Confessions, it is a sophistical model of rhetoric he has in mind. “Augustine never abandons rhetoric qua rhetoric in practice,” writes Troup, “but rejects only the abuses of the Second Sophistic.” As we shall see, Augustine thought much in the rhetorical tradition was useful in the Christian church … (126)

Thus, rhetoric posed Augustine a second dilemma: It was useful, even vital to confuting the heretics and teaching his own congregation, but it was also suspect and potential dangerous art. Augustine resolved his dilemma by reasoning that rhetoric should not be at the disposal only of the unbelieving. Moreover, the Bible itself was a model of eloquence for the Christian. He treats these problems in his most important work on rhetoric, De Doctrina Christiana. (127-8)

Christians needed training in reading the Bible, and even in defending it, if the Christian gospel was to be preserved and propagated. “The De Doctrina was written for clergy and highly educated members of the laity,” writes Johnson, “to help them in their efforts to read the Bible and to give them advice about how to go about sharing what they had learned with fellow Christans who were less educated than themselves.” (128)

*** In De Doctrina Augustine sets out a sophisticated theory of the relationship between words or “signs,” and the things they represent. In Book II Augustine divides the world into the broad categories: things, and signs pointing to things. Words are one set of signs, but Augustine also held that the world itself could be understood as a system of signs pointing people to God. Human beings themselves, in fact, are a kind of symbol in that they are created in the image of God. The whole world of physical things, the, is to be used to return us to God, not to be enjoyed for its own sake. /
This distinction between the sign and the thing signified helps the Christian preacher discern two different kinds of meanings in objects encountered in scripture. For example, a rock or a tree in a biblical story are physical objects, signified by the words rock and tree. However, the rock or the tree may also themselves be signs with their own spiritual meaning. The rock may refer to Christ, as St. Paul suggested that a rock in one Mosaic story did. The tree may represent everlasting life. (129)

Martianus Capella… A lawyer with a strong interest in mysticism and little regard for Christianity, Capella lived in Carthage … best known for a single work, broken into several books, that presented in prose and poetry the seven liberal arts. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of his work, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury (A.D. 429), which included his Book of Rhetoric. One scholar has called The Marriage of Philology and Mercury “the most successful textbook ever written,” and it certainly was one of the most widely used books in medieval schools. In his strange, massive, and thoroughly pagan book, Capella imagines a wedding in which the god Mercury gives his bride a gift of the seven liberal arts constituting the core of the medieval curriculum. These seven are grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and harmonics. … Capella represented rhetoric as a heavily armed woman, a tradition that continued throughout the Middle Ages. (130)

Typical of the preaching manuals of the late Middle Ages is Robert of Basevorn’s Forma Praedicandi (The Form of Preaching). … Robert turns to a discussion of the method of preaching by developing themes. Interestingly, themes ought to “contain not more than three statements or convertible to three.” He is insistent on this point, devoting an entire chapter, Chapter XIX, to the discussion of divisibility by three. “No matter how many statements there may be, as long as I can divide them into three, I have a sufficient proposition.” This notion that sermons ought to be divisible into three sections persists in preaching to this day. (133)

According to the treatises on letter writing, a letter should be divided into five parts. George Kennedy explains that the “standard five-part epistolary structure” is reminiscent of typical Roman divisions of a speech: “The salutatio, or greeting; the captatio benevoluntatiae, or exordium, which secured the goodwill of the recipient; the narratio (the body of the letter setting out the details of the problem to be addressed); the petitio, or specific request, demand, or announcement; and a relatively simple conclusio.” Of these parts, the salutio received a disproportionate amount of attention, probably because establishing the correct relationship between yourself and… (135)

Praedicandi (Ars) The art of preaching; one of three medieval rhetorical arts. (143)

Great French scholar Peter Ramus (1515-1572)… Ramus vehemently opposed scholasticism, proposing an alternative approach to learning that did not make reference to authorities such as Aristotle or Cicero at all. As Peter Mack writes, the iconoclastic Ramus “built his academic career on scandalous attacks on the academics gods of his time: Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian.” He was skeptical about the value of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s treatment of rhetoric, calling the former “the man chiefly responsible for confusing the arts of rhetoric and dialectic,” and the latter “verbose” and “unable to restrain and check himself” when making a speech. /
Though he owed much to Quintilian, the great Roman teacher also became Ramus’ target in an angry attack entitled, Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintiliam (1549). Ramus rejected Quintilian’s famous conception of the perfect orator as a virtuous as well as an eloquent person, summed up in the Latin phrase Vir bonus beni dicendi (“The good man speaking well”). Such a view, which ignored the brute fact that an eloquent speaker could also be an evil person, was for Ramus simply “useless and stupid.” … Ong writes that “in a very real sense Italian humanism stood for a rhetorically centered opposed to the dialectically or logically centered culture of North Europe.” Ramus preferred the latter, less rhetorical, model of liberal education. … Because of Ramus’ enormous intellectual influence, rhetoric suffered considerable loss of prestige as a study… Ramus “separated thought from language” by advancing a model of education in which “reason breaks free of speech.” (167)

Whereas rhetoric was suffering under the criticism of Agricola and Ramus on the European continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, England was developing into a particularly fertile filed for the growth of interest in the art of rhetoric between 1500 and 1600. (167)

It has been noted by some scholars that the eighteenth century marks a period in which rhetorical theory turned away from its traditional concern for the invention of arguments, and toward aesthetic matters of style and good delivery. One leading expert on the period, Barbara Warnick, suggests that this shift in emphasis reflects the influence of Ramus in the sixteenth century and Descartes in the seventeenth. Both writers moved argument and proof out of the domain of rhetoric and into the domains of logic, dialectic, and mathematics. … At the same time, we might also note in this period a shift form an earlier concern for rhetoric’s public role as the techne of civil discourse as a window on the human mind or a means of personal refinement. (175)

Vico wrote passionately in response to the great philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, who despised rhetoric and wished to relegate it to an obscured place in the academy. (176)

Other changes taking in place in eighteenth-century England assisted rhetoric’s rise to prominence in education. English was displacing Latin as the language of scholarship, … urbanization was bringing people from the English countryside, from Scotland, and form Ireland to urban centers such as London. Many of these new city dwellers recognized that their rustic accents limited the possibility for personal advancement in the bigger cities. The rhetorical education. Thus, education in rhetoric was sought out by an increasingly broad cross-section of the British public during the century. … For a variety of reasons, then, rhetoric occupied a central place in British education in the eighteenth century. Winifred Horner notes that the potential for upward mobility in English society, a mobility dependent on a command of “good English,” meant that there was a strong demand for language instruction, particularly instruction in writing. (180)

Whatley’s Elements of Rhetoric … an ecclesiastical rhetoric… a treatise on the art of rhetoric that would assist both the preacher and the apologist or defender of Christianity. … Whatley’s theory, then, represents a break with one important emphasis of the classical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero: the tendency to see rhetoric as pursuing probable truths on debatable issues. If truth is absolute, rhetoric does not determine truth, though it may help to discover it. (190)

Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler

Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, The Modern Library, New York, 1939.

Walton was born at Stafford on August 9, 1593. … the son of Jervis Walton, of whom nothing further is known except that he died in February 1596/7. Of Walton’s mother nothing is known, not even her name. (Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of Izaak Walton, 3)

His first marriage took place on December 27, 1626, his wife being Rachel Floud of Canterbury, through whom he became connected with the Cranmer family. … Rachel Walton lived for nearly fourteen years after her marriage and bore six children, but none of them survived infancy. Nothing further is known of Walton’s married life. Rachel Walton died in 1640, and six years later Walton married for the second time, … By her he had three children, a daughter and two sons, one of whom survived. Anne Walton lived for sixteen years after her marriage, dying at Worcester in 1662… (5-6)

Meanwhile, in 1664, Walton had left his house in Chancery Lane, because it was “dangerous for honest men to be there”, dangerous, that is, for a Royalist. There is no reason, however, for supposing that he left London, and it is probable that in 1650 he was living in Clerkenwell. (6)

Walton had published his Compleat Angler in 1653, and it had immediately become popular, so that several editions were sold in a few years. (7)

It does not seem to have occurred to Walton before 1683 that he might die, but at last, on August 9 of that year, his ninetieth birthday, he decided to make his will, (11)

Piscator: … my purpose is to bestow a day or two in helping to destroy some of those villainous vermin, for I hate them perfectly, because they love fish so well, or rather, because they destroy so much; (35)

Auceps: As first the Lark, when she means to rejoice, to chear her self and those that hear her, she then quits the earth, and sings as she ascends higher into the air, and having ended her heavenly imployment, grows then mute and sad to think she must descend to the dull earth, which she would not touch but for necessity. (41)

Auceps: Nay, the smaller birds also do the like in their particular seasons, namely the Leverock, the Tit-lark, and little Linnet, and the honest Robin, that loves mankind both alive and dead. (41)

Auceps: There is also a little contemptible winged Creature [42] (an inhabitant of my Aerial Element) namely the laborious Bee, of whose Prudence, Policy and regular Government of their own Commonwealth I might say much, as also of their several kinds, and how useful their honey and wax is both for meat and Medicines to mankind; but I will leave them to their sweet labour, without the least disturbance, believing them to be all very busie amongst the herbs and flowers that we see nature puts forth this May morning. (42-3)

Venator: How doth the earth bring forth herbs, flowers and fruits, both for physick and the pleasure of mankind? and above all, to me at least, the fruitful Vine, of which when I drink moderately, it clears my brain, chears my heart, and sharpens my wit. (45)

Piscator: And for that I shall tell you, that in ancient times a debate hath risen (and it remains yet unresolved) Whether the happiness of man in this world doth consist more in Contemplation or action [55] … Concerning which two opinions I shall forbear to add a third, by declaring my own, and rest my self contented in telling you (my very worthy friend) that both these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmlesse art of Angling. (55-6)

Piscator: And this seems also to be intimated by the Children of Israel (Psal. 137) who having in a sad condition banished all mirth and musique from their pensive hearts, and having hung up their then mute Harps upon the Willow-trees growing by the Rivers of Babylon, sate down upon those banks bemoaning the ruines of Sion, and contemplating their own sad condition. (56-7)

Piscator: The Cuttle-fish will cast a long gut out of her throat, which (like as an Angler doth his line) she sendeth forth and pulleth in again at her pleasure, according as she sees some little fish come near to her; and the Cuttle-fish [note: Mount. Essayes: and others affirm this.] (being then hid in the gravel) lets the smaller fish nibble and bite the end of it, at which time she by little and little draws the smaller fish so near to her, that she may leap upon her, and then catches and devours her: and for this reason some have called this fish the Sea-angler. /
And there is a fish called a Hermit, that at a certain age gets into a dead fishes shell, and little a Hermite dwells there alone, studying the wind and weather, and so turns her shell that she makes it defend her from the injuries that they would bring upon her. (60)

Piscator: At first, what Dubartas says of a fish called the Sargus; which (because none can expresse it better than he does) I shall give you in his own words, supposing it shall not have the less credit for being Verse, for he hath gathered this, and other observations out of Authors that have been great and industrious searchers into the secrets of Nature.
The Adult’rous Sargus doth not only change
Wifes every day in the deep streams, but (strange)
As if the honey of Sea-love delight
Could not suffice his raging appetite,
Goes courting she-Goats on the grassie shore,
Horning their husbands that had horns before. (61)

Piscator: On the contrary, what shall I say of the House-Cock, which treads any Hen, and then (contrary to the Swan, and Partridge and Pigeon) takes no care to hatch, to feed or to cherish his own brood, but is senseless though they perish. (63)

Piscator: Concerning which last, namely the Prophet Amos, I shall make but this Observation, That he that shall read the humble, lowly, plain style of that Prophet, and compare it with the high-glorious, eloquent style of the Prophet Isaiah (thought they be both equally true) may easily believe him to be, not only a Shepherd, but a good-natur’d, plain Fisher-man. /
Which I do the rather believe, by comparing the affectionate, loving, lowly, humble Epistles of S. Peter, S. James and S. John, whom we know were all Fishers, with the glorious language and high Metaphors of S. Paul, who we may believe was not. (66)

Piscator: And let me adde this more, he that views the ancient Ecclesiastical Canons, shall find Hunting to be forbidden to Church-men, as being a toilsome, perplexing Recreation; and shall find angling allowed to Clergy-men, as being a harmlesse Recreation, a recreation that invites them to contemplation and quietness. (67)

Piscator: … and his custome was to spend besides his fixt hours of prayer… this good man was observed to spend a tenth part of his time in Angling; and also (for I have conversed with those which have conversed with him) to bestow a tenth part of his Revenue, and usually all his fish, amongst the poor that inhabited near to those Rivers in which it was caught: saying often, That charity gave life to Religion: and at his return to his house would praise God he had spent that day free from worldly trouble; both harmlessly, and in a recreation that became a Church-man. (68)

Piscator: Jo. Davors Esq. /
Let me live harmlessly, and near the brink
Of Trent or Avon have a dwelling place;
Where I may see my quill or cork down sink
With eager bit of Pearch, or Bleak, or Dace;
And on the world and my Creator think,
Whilst some men strive, ill gotten goods t’ imbrace;
And others spend their time in base excesse
Of wine and worse, and war and wantonness. (71)

Venator: Why, Sir, what’s the skin worth?
Hunter: ’Tis work ten shillings to make gloves; the gloves of an Otter are the best fortification for your hands that can be thought on against wet weather.
Piscator: I pray, honest Huntsman, let me ask you a pleasant question, do you hunt a beast or a fish? (75)

Venator: …now all the dogs have her, some above and some under water; but now, now she’s tir’d, and past losing: come bring him to me, Sweet-lips. Look, ’tis a Bitch-Otter, and she has lately whelp’d, (76)

Piscator: And now to your question concerning your House, to speak truly, he is not to me a good companion: for most of his conceits were either Scripture-jests, or lascivious jests; for which I count no man witty; (79)

Piscator: having so done, put some sweet herbs into his belly, and then tye him with two or three splinters to a spit, and rost him, basted often with vinegar, or rather verjuice and butter, with good store of salt mixt with it. (84)

Piscator: Being thus used and drest presently, and not washt after he is gutted, (for note that lying long in water, and washing the blood out of the Fish after they by gutted, abates much of their sweetnesse) … Or you may dress the Chavender or Chub thus: / When you hav scaled him, and cut off his tail and fins, and washed him very clean, then chine or slit him through the middle, as a salt fish is usually cut, then give him three or four cuts or scotches with your knife, and broil him on Char-coal, or Wood-coal that are free from smoke, and all the time he is a-broyling baste him with the best sweet butter, and good store of salt mixt with it; and to this add a little Time cut exceeding small, or bruised into the butter. (85)

Piscator: You shall read in Seneca his natural Questions (Lib. 3, cap. 17) that the Ancients were so curious in the newnesse of their Fish, that that seemed not new enough that was not put alive into the guests hand; (90)

Piscator: … Sir George Hastings (an excellent Angler, and now with God), and he hath told me, he thought that trout but not for hunger but wantonness; (92-3)

Piscator: Now you are to know, that it is observed, that usually the best trouts are either red or yellow, though some (as the Fordidge trout) be white and yet good; (96)

Piscator: But turn out of the way a little, good Scholar, towards yonder high hedge: We’ll sit whilst this shower falls so gently upon the teeming earth, and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn these verdant Meadowes. (98-9)

Piscator: … and sometimes I beguil’d time by viewing harmlesse Lambs, some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst other sported themselves in the chearful Sun; (99)

Coridon: Oh the sweet contentment
The country-man doth find!
high trolollie lollie loe
high trolollie lee.
That quiet contemplation
possesseth all my mind:
Then care away,
And wend along with me. (108)

Coridon: The ploughman, though he labor hard,
Yet on the Holy-Day,
high trolollie lollie loe
high trolollie lee.
No Emperour so merrily
does pass his time away:
Then care away,
And wend along with me. (109)

Piscator: My hand alone my work can do,
So I can fish and study too. (111)

Piscator: But yet though while I fish, I fast;
I make good fortune my repast: (112)

Piscator: Now for Flies… and indeed too many either for me to name or for you to remember: and their breeding is so various and wonderful, that I might easily amaze my self, and tire you in a relation of them. (119)

Piscator: … those very many flies, worms, and little living creatures with which the Sun and Summer adorn and beautifie the River banks… (119)

Piscator: [regarding insects] Pliny holds an opinion, that many have their birth or being from a dew that in the Spring falls upon the leaves of trees; and that some kinds of them are from a dew left upon herbs or flowers; and others form a dew left upon Colworts or Cabbages: … And some affirm, that every plant has his particular flye or Caterpillar, which it breeds and feeds. [120] … But yet I shall tell you what Aldrovandus, our Topsel, and other say of the Palmerworm, or Caterpillar, That whereas others content themselves to feed on particular herbs or leaves, (for most think those very leaves that gave them life and shape, give them a particular feeding and nourishment, and that upon them they usually abide) yet he observes, that this is called a pilgrim or palmer-worm, for his very wandring life and various food; (120-1)

Piscator: … observation of Du Baratas:
God not contented to each kind to give,
And to infuse the vertue generative,
By his wise power made many creatures breed
Of lifelesse bodies without Venus deed.
/
So the cold humor breeds the Salamander,
…
In th’Icy Islands goslings hatcht of trees,
Whose fruitful leaves falling into the water,
Are turn’d (’tis known) to living fowls soon after. (123)

Piscator: … and before you begin to Angle, cast to have the wind on your back, and the Sun (if it shines) to be before you, and to Fish down the stream; and carry the point or top of your Rod downward, by which means the shadow of your self, and Rod too will be the least offensive to the Fish, for the sight of any shade amazes the Fish, … (128-9)

Piscator: Indeed my good Scholar, we may say of Angling, as Dr. Boteler said of Strawberries; Doubtlesse God could have made a better berry, but doubtlesse God never did; And so (if I might be Judge) God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than Angling. (137)

Piscator: Or with my Bryan, and a book,
Loyter long dayes near Shawford-brook;
There sit by him, and eat my meat,
There see the Sun both rise and set:
There bid good morning to next day,
There meditate my time away:
And angle on, and beg to have
A quiet passage to a welcome grave. (138-9)

Piscator: … affirmed by Sir Francis Bacon… as it is by that learned man, has made me to believe that Eeles unbed themselves, and stir at the noise of the Thunder, … (147)

Piscator: [Umber fish] Much more might be said both of the smell and taste, but I shall only tell you, that S. Ambrose the glorious Bishop of Milan (who liv’d when the Church kept Fasting days) calls him the flowre fish, or flowre of fishes, and that he was so far in love with him, that he would not let him pass without the honour of a long Discourse; but I must; and pass on to tell you how to take this dainty fish. (151)

Piscator: The mighty Luce or Pike is taken to be the Tyrant (as the Salmon is the King) of the fresh waters. ’Tis not to be doubted, but that they are bred some by generation, and some not: as namely, of a Weed called Pickerel-weed, unless learned Gesner be much mistaken; for he sayes, this weed and other glutinous matter, with the help of the Suns heat in some particular Moneths, some Ponds apted for it by nature, do become Pikes. (161)

Piscator: And it is observed, that the pike will eat venomous things (as some kinds of Frogs are) and yet live without being harmed by them… he never eats the venomous Frog, till he have first killed her, and then (as Ducks are observed to do to Frogs in Spawning time, at which time some Frogs are observed to be venomous) so throughly washt her, by tumbling her up and down in the water, that he may devour her without danger. (163)

Piscator: The pike is also observed to be a solitary, melancholly and a bold Fish: Melancholly, because he alwayes swimmes or rests himself alone, and never swimmes in sholes or with company, as Roach and Dace, and most other Fish do: And bold, because he fears not a shadow, or to see or be seen of any body, as the Trout and Chub, and all other Fish do. (164)

Piscator: Dubravius (a Bishop in Bohemia) : As he and the Bishop Thurzo were walking by a large Pond in Bohemia, they saw a Frog, when the Pike lay very sleepily and quiet by the shore side, leap upon his head, and the frog having exprest malice or anger by his swolne cheeks and staring eyes, did streatch out his legs and imbraced the Pikes head, and presently reached them to his eyes, tearing with them and his teeth those tender parts; the Pike moved with anguish, moves up and down the water, and rubs himself against weeds, and what ever he thought might quit him of his enemy; but all in vain, for the frog did continue to ride triumphantly, and bite and torment the Pike till his strength failed, and then he sunk with the Pike to the bottome of the water; then presently the frog appeared again at the top and croaked, and semed to rejoice like Conqueror, and then presently retired to her secret hole. The Bishop, that had beheld the battel, called his fishermen to fetch his nets, and by all means to get the Pike, that they might declare what had hapned: and the Pike was drawn forth, and both his eyes eaten out, at which when they began to wonder, the Fisherman wished them to forbear, and assured them he was certain that Pikes were often so served. (165-6)

Piscator: The Carp is the Queen of Rivers, a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish, that was not at first bred, nor hath been long in England, but it now naturalized. (175)

Piscator: Janus Dubravius has writ a Book of Fish and Fish-ponds, in which he saies, That … three or four Male-Carps will follow a Female, and that then she putting on a seeming coyness, they force her through weeds and flags, where she lets fall her Eggs or Spawn, which sticks fast to the weeds, an then they let fall their Melt upon it, … when the Spawner has weakened her self by doing that natural office, that two or three Melters have helped her from off the weeds, by bearing her up on both sides, and guarding her into the deep. And you may note, that though this may seem a curiosity not worth observing, yet others have judged it worth their time and costs to make Glasse-hives¬, and order them in such a manner as to see how Bees have bred and made their Honey-combs, and how they have obeyed their King, and governed their Common-wealth. (179-80)

Piscator: The Bream… He is very broad and forked tail, and his scales set in excellent order, (185)

Piscator: But though some do not, yet the French esteem this Fish highly, and to that end have this Proverb, He that hath Breams in his pond is able to bid his friend welcome. (186)

Piscator: But bite the Pearch will, and that very boldly: and as one has wittily observed, if there be twenty or forty in a hole, they may be at one standing all catch’d one after another; they being, as he saies, like the wicked of the world, not afraid though their fellows and companions perish in their sight. (198)

Piscator: And others say, that Eeles growing old, breed other Eeles out of the corruption of their own age, which Sir Francis Bacon sayes, exceeds not ten years. … But that Eeles may be bred as some worms, and some kind of Bees and Wasps are, either of dew, or out of the corruption of the earth, seems to be made probable by the Barnacles and young Goslings bred by the Suns heat, and the rotten planks of an old Ship, and hatched of trees; (202-3)

Piscator: It is said by Randeletius, that those Eeles that are bred in Rivers that relate to, or be nearer to the Sea, never return to the fresh waters (as the Salmon does alwayes desire to do) when they have once tasted the salt water; (204)

Piscator: But Scholar, there is a fish that they in Lancashire boast very much of, called a Char, taken there (and I think there only) in a Mere called, Winander Mere; a Mere, sayes Cambden, that is the largest in this Nation, being ten miles in length, and as smooth in the bottom as if it were paved with pollisht marble: this fish never exceeds fifteen or sixteen inches in length; and ’tis spotted like a Trout, and has scarce a bone but on the back: (209)

Piscator: But the Barbel, though he be of a fine shape, and looks big, yet he is not accounted the best fish to eat, (211)

Piscator: There is also a Bleak, or fresh-water-Sprat, a Fish that is ever in motion, and therefore called by some the River-Swallow; for just as you shall observe the Swallow to be most evenings in Summer ever in motion, making short and quick turnes when he flies to catch Flies in the aire (by which he lives), so does the Bleak at the top of the water. Ausonius would have him called Bleak from his whitish colour: his back is of a pleasant sad or Sea-water-green, his belly white and shining as the Mountain snow; … Or this Fish may be caught with a fine small artificial flie, which is to be of a very sad brown colour, and very small, and the hook answerable. (217-8)

Piscator: we sit still,
and watch our quill;
Fishers must not rangle.
(from Jo. Chalkhill. 222)

Piscator: Or we sometimes pass an hour
Under a green Willow,
That defends us from a showre,
Making earth our pillow,
There we may
think and pray
before death
stops our breath:
(from Jo. Chalkhill. 222)

Venator: … I sate down under a Willow-tree by the water side, and considered what you had told me of the Owner of that pleasant Meadow in which you then left me; that he had a plentiful estate, and not a heart to think so; that he had at this time many Law-suits depending; … pitying this poor rich man, that owned this, and many other pleasant Groves and Meadows about me, I did thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth; or rather; they injoy what the other possess and injoy not; for Anglers and meek quiet-spirited-men, are free from those high, those restless thoughts which corrode the sweets of life; (223-4)

Piscator: Phineas Fletcher …
His life is neither tost in boisterous Seas,
Or the vexatious world, or lost in slothful ease;
…
His bed more safe than soft, yields sleeps,
While by his side his faithful Spouse has place,
His little son into his bosom creeps,
The lively picture of his father face. (225)

Piscator: And you may take notice, that as the Carp is accounted the Water-fox, for his cunning, so the Roach is accounted the Water-sheep for his simplicity or foolishness. (229)

Piscator: You are to cleanse your Pond if you intend either profit or pleasure, once every three or four Years (especially some Ponds) and then let them lie drie six or twelve moneths, both to kill the water-weeds, as Water-lillies, Candocks, Reate, and Bull-rushes, that breed there; and also that as these die for want of water, so grasse may grow on the Ponds bottom, which Carps will eat greedily in all the hot moneths. (251-2)

Venator: a bottle of Sack, Milk, Oranges, and Sugar, which all put together, make a drink like Nectar, indeed too good for any body but us Anglers: and so Master, here is a full glass to you of that liquor, (257)

Venator: Go, let the diving Negro seek
For Gems hid in some forlone [sic] creek:
We all pearls scorne,
Save what the dewy morne
Congeals upon each little spire of grasse,
Which carelesse shepherds beat down as they passe: (259)

Piscator: a Farewell to the vanities of the World, and some say written by Sir Harry Wootton …
Beauty [’s] (th’ eyes idol) but a damask’d skin;
State but a golden prison, to live in,
And torture free-born minds; … (260)


I would be wise, but that I often see
The Fox suspected, whilest the Ass goes free:
I would be fair, but see the fair and proud
(Like the bright Sun) oft setting in a cloud.
…
wise suspected… fair tempted… (261)


And hold one minute of this holy leasure
Beyond the riches of this empty pleasure.
/
Welcome pure thoughts, welcome ye silent Groves,
These guests, these courts my soul most dearly loves:
…
Then here I’ll sit and sigh my hot loves folly,
And learn t’affect a holy melancholy,
And if Contentment be a stranger then,
I’ll ne’re look for it, but in heaven agen. (262)

Venator: This is my firm resolution, and as a pious man advised his friend, That to beget Mortification he should frequent Churches, and view Monuments, and Charnel-houses, and then and there consider, how many dead bones time had piled up at the gates of death. So when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the Power, and Wisdom, and Providence of Almighty God, I will walk the Meadows by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the Lillies that take no care, and those very many other various little living creatures that are not only created but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of Nature. (263)

Christopher Hitchens, Arguably

Christopher Hitchens, Arguably, Twelve Books, New York, 2011.

In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—the basis of the later First Amendment—they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous “wall of separation” letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by—the Congregationalists of Connecticut. (Gods of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment, 5)

It is arguably a good thing—and in no way detracts from Andrew Burstein absorbing book—that Jefferson’s Secrets does not quite live up to its title. Secrecy, death, and desire are the ingredients of the sensational, even of the violent, and they consort ill with the measure and scruple for which Thomas Jefferson is still renowned. It might be better to say that this study is an inquiry into the privacy and reticence of a very self-contained man, along with an educated speculation upon the motives and promptings for his defensive style. (The Private Jefferson, 9)

…this was a man who could oppose the emancipation of slaves because he feared the “ten thousand recollections” they would retain of their hated condition, while almost in the same breath saying dismissively that “their griefs are transient.” (The Private Jefferson, 10)

How many know that perhaps 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780? We dimly recall that Miguel de Cervantes was briefly in the galleys. But what of the people of the town of Baltimore in Ireland, all carried off by “corsair” raiders in a single night? (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 13)

One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 13)

There were many Americans—John Adams among them—who made the case that it was better policy to pay the tribute. It was cheaper than the loss of trade, for one thing, and a battle against the pirates would be “too rugged for our people to bear.” Putting the matter starkly, Adams said: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”
The cruelty, exorbitance, and intransigence of the Barbary states, however, would decide things. The level of tribute demanded began to reach 10 percent of the American national budget, with no guarantee that greed would not increase that percentage, while from the dungeons of Algiers and Tripoli came appalling reports of the mistreatment of captured men and women. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 15)

Once again, Barbary obstinacy tipped the scale. Yusuf Karamanli, the pasha of Tripoli, declared war on the United States in May 1801, in pursuit of his demand for more revenue. This earned him a heavy bombardment of Tripoli and the crippling of one of his most important ships. … The Barbary regimes continued to underestimated their new enemy, with Morocco declaring war in its turn and the others increasing their blackmail. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 16)

But even the dullest soul could regard the continued triangular Atlantic slave trade between Africa, England, and the Americas and perceive the double standard at work. Thus, the struggle against Barbary may have helped to force some of the early shoots of abolitionism. (Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates, 19)

There are two kinds of people: those who read Franklin’s celebrated Autobiography with a solemn expression, and those who keep laughing out loud as they go along. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 22)

A few pages father on we read of the tyranny exerted by his brother, who wanted both to indenture him and to beat him, “Tho’ He was otherwise not an ill-natur’d Man: Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking.” Surely an instance of what I call moral jujitsu (of which more later), in which pretended humility can cut like a lash. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 22)

…those who really did take the Autobiography at face value. It is no surprise to find D. H. Lawrence among these, because a more humorless man probably never drew mortal breath. But it is astonishing to find Mark Twain saying in effect that the book had made life harder for his Toms and Hucks, who had to bear this additional burden of schoolmarmery and moral exhortation, imposed by those determined to “improve” them at any price. (Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy, 23)

The 1747 “Speech of Missy Polly Baker,” in which a common whore made a notably eloquent speech in defense of her right to bear bastard children, fooled almost everyone at the time. We may be right in speaking of an age of innocence, in which Miss Baker’s apologia (she is “hard put to it” for a living, “cannot conceive” the nature of her offense, and half admits “all my Faults and Miscarriages”) was received with furrowed and anxious brows. But the only wonder, once you get the trick of it, is how Franklin was able to use such broad and easy punning to lampoon the Pharisees of the day. He even tells us in the Autobiography how it became a delight to him to pen anonymous screeds, put them under the door of the newspaper office at night, and then watch the local worthies try to puzzle out their authorship. (24)

Franklin’s moral jujitsu, in which he always seemingly deferred to his opponents in debate but left them first punching the air and then adopting his opinions as their own, is frequently and slyly boasted about in the Autobiography, but it cannot have afforded him as much pleasure as the applause and income he received from people who didn’t know he was kidding. The tip-offs are all there once you learn to look for them, as with Franklin’s friend Osborne, who died young. /
‘He and I had made a serious Agreement, that the one who happen’d first to die, should if possible make a friendly Visit to the other, and acquaint him how he found things in that separate State. But he never fulfill’d his Promise.’ (27)

Lincoln… To read of the unrelenting coarseness and brutality of the boy’s father is lowering to the spirit, as is the shame he felt at his mother’s reputation for unchastity. (Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child, 35)

Lincoln’s own experience of legal bondage and hard usage is very graphically told: Not only did his father’s improvidence deprive him of many necessities, but it resulted in his being hired out as a menial to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his father’s rough and miserly neighbors. … struggled to keep reading, an activity feared and despised by his father, as it was by the owner of Frederick Douglass, … (Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child, 36)

Here again, we can see the legalistic and sometimes pedantic mind that exhausted all the possibilities of compromise before coming up with the tortuous form of words that finally became the Emancipation Proclamation. / In rather the same way, Lincoln sought a deft means of negotiating the shoals of the religious question. Burlingame’s highly diverting early pages show Lincoln being actively satirical in matters of faith, lampooning preachers, staging mock services, and praying to God “to put stockings on the chicken’s feet in winter,” in the words of his stepsister Matilda. Reminiscing about frontier Baptists many years, he told an acquaintance: “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!” … Several moments in the narrative—the bee-fighting preacher being one such—put me in mind of Mark Twain. The tall tales, the dry wit, the broad-gauge humor, the imminence of farce even in grave enterprises: (37)

Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, too, were persons who could only have been original Americans, sprung from American ground. It is engaging and affecting to read of Lincoln’s lifelong troubles with spelling and pronunciation (he addressed himself to “Mr. Cheerman” in his famous Cooper Union Speech of 1860) and of his frequent appearance with as much as six inches of shin or arm protruding from his ill-made clothes: truly a Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. (37)

“Do not misunderstand me,” said Amis p[e]re when he reviewed the first edition, “if I say that one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough.” … (Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita, 72)

…neither can I forget Sally’s older brother [Martin Amis], who wrote, / ‘Parents and guardians of twelve-year-old girls will have notices that their wards have a tendency to be difficult. That may take Humbert’s word for it that things are much more difficult—are in fact entirely impossible—when your twelve-year-old girl is also your twelve-year-old girlfriend. The next time that you go out with your daughter, imagine that you are going out with your daughter.’ (72)

But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymph-like girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) (73)

…Humbert himself does not allow us to forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time… (73)

Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”? (Vidal Loco, 90)

How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seemed to lose, (America the Banana Republic, 96)

Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? (America the Banana Republic, 97)

Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? (America the Banana Republic, 97)

Three portraits by Hans Holbein… The first shows King Henry VIII in all his swollen arrogance and finery… (The Men Who Made England: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 146-7)

Cromwell has sufficient immunity to keep his own edition of William Tyndale’s forbidden English Bible, published overseas and smuggled back home, with a title page that carries the mocking words printed in utopia. Thomas More will one day see to it that Tyndale, too, burns alive for that jibe. (148)

Cromwell is a practical skeptic here too, because he has spent some hard time on the Continent and knows, he says, that “the English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.” (The Men Who Made England: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 148)

More discloses himself as a hybrid of Savonarola and Bartleby the Scrivener:
“Let us be clear. You will not take the oath because your conscience advises you against it?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be a little more comprehensive in your answers?”
“No.”
“You object but you won’t say why?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the matter of the stature you object to, or the form of the oath, or the business of oath-taking in itself?”
“I would rather not say.”
By this time, any luckless prisoner of More’s would have been stretched naked on the rack, but his questioners persist courteously enough until he suddenly lashes out as the arrogant theocrat he is:
“You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, … (The Men Who Made England, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 150-1)

…generations of sentimental and clerical history will canonize More while making Cromwell’s name a hissing and a byword. (151)

It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one. (Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet, 153)

In point of fact Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction. (153)

Johnson… Oliver Sacks was able some years ago to make a fairly definite retrospective diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome. (Samuel Johnson: Demons and Dictionaries, 167)

Johnson’s pitiless and violent hatred of the American Revolution, and his contemptuous cruelty towards those who apostatized from the established church (even if it was to join another Christian sect) was strong and consistent. (169)

What is amazing is the industry with which Flaubert assimilated so many books on arcane subjects (some 1,500, according to Polizzotti), all of this knowledge acquired just so that a brace of nobodies could manage to get things not just wrong, but exactly wrong. (Gustave Flaubert: I’m with Stupide, 174)

…the possessor of an anarchic sense of humor: This yields the same result. What did oyster shuckers do, Dickens demanded to know, when the succulent bivalves were out of season? / ‘Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically-sealed bottles—for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster-season? Who knows?’ / This pearl was contained in a private letter not intended for publication (Dickens was almost always “on”) and is somewhat more searching than the dull question—“Where do the ducks in Central Park go in winter?”—that was asked by the boy who spoke so scornfully of “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” [Dickens vs. Caufield] (The Dark Side of Dickens, 176)

Dickens …He may not have had Shakespeare’s or Eliot’s near omniscience about human character, … (176)

Genuine radicals and reformers in mid-nineteenth-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second. … he was on balance sympathetic to the Confederate states, which he had never visited, and made remarks about Negroes that might have shocked even the pathologically racist Carlyle. (178)

It’s easy to tell, form the protractedly unfunny sarcasm about Mrs. Jellyby and the mock-African hellhole of Borrioboola-Gha in Bleak House, that the author did not possess the gift of imaginative sympathy when it came to those outside his immediate ken, or should I say kin. (178)

…we also encounter a method of Rebecca West’s that has given rise to much criticism. Her nonfictional characters are conscripted more as dramatis personae—Montefiore likens her to Thucydides—and given long speeches, … Throughout the book both she and her husband make long and quite grammatical addresses that would be unthinkable in real life, if only because they would be interrupted if given in mixed company and walked out upon if they occurred at the domestic hearth. (Rebecca West: Things Worth Fighting For, 198)

Note the slight clumsiness, which seems to have inflected everything Maugham ever wrote. (W. Somerset Maugham, 245)

…the specially planted avacado trees, with a skilled resident cook to transform the luscious green fruit into an ice cream flavored with rum. (This contrasts with the rebarbative lobster ice cream served by Ribbentrop at a dinner recorded in “Chips”: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon.) (247)

…Maugham kept to a rigorous regime at his desk, and turned out third-rate prose by the yard, … (248)

Permanently injured by the flagrant adultery of his first wife, and almost certainly a badly repressed homosexual, he made a living example of Cyril Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence,” whereby Englishmen of a certain caste are doomed to re-enact their school days. The vices of the boy are notably unappealing in the grown man, and Waugh was frequently upbraided for the apparent contrast between his extreme nastiness and his ostentatious religiosity. To this he famously replied (to Nancy Mitford) that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. A nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny. In at least two cases—his support for the Croatian Fascist Party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity towards Jews—there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels, Helena (which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and Brideshead, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity. (Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent, 251)

He toiled in three demanding vineyards: musical comedy, screenwriting, and fiction. (P.G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy, 270)

This passage helps to introduce the oft-attempted comparison between Powell and Proust. There is, first and most obviously, that ability to evoke childhood which is, alas, lost to so many of us but still, somehow, recognizable when well done. … Like Proust, Powell was not exactly pithy (I can’t offhand recall any “quotations” from Powell, as one can from his great contemporaries Wodehouse and Waugh), but I hope I have conveyed something of the worthwhileness of hearing him out. One learns to trust certain raconteurs, even if they appear at first to be long of wind. (Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity, 279)

George Orwell, whose flinty socialist principles—and persistence in trying to live up to them—might well have invited Powell’s gentle ridicule but (perhaps because they were not bogus) instead won his respect. The pages recollecting his friend are of interest and some beauty: ‘Goodness knows what Orwell would have been like in the army. I have no doubt whatever that he would have been brace, but bravery in the army is, on the whole, an ultimate rather than immediate requirement, demanded only at the end of a long and tedious apprenticeship.’ Here again, reading that deceptively dense sentence, one is reminded of what it is to be molded by a very highly evolved and somewhat stratified society. In such a system courage is neither a sufficient nor even in the strict sense a necessary condition for the high calling of arms; a force that depended on mere bravery would be merely a militant rabble—subject to mood swings, perhaps, and indubitably depriving its officer corps of opportunities for understatement. Such almost invisible writing about the most palpable of questions is a continual distinction of Powerll’s work and an unending reward for the reading of it. (282)

[after an excerpt: ] As I say, Powell knew when and how to write sparely. (282)

Graham Greene once wrote a celebrated essay about a doppelganger who cared enough to haunt and shadow him, even to masquerade as him. This “other” Greene appeared to have anterior knowledge of the movements of his model, sometimes showing up to grant an interview or fill a seat in a restaurant, so that Greene himself, when he arrive in some old haunt or new locale, would be asked why he had returned so soon. … This mode of imitation or emulation or substitution—at once a form of flattery and a species of threat, or at any rate of challenge— (Graham Greene: I’ll Be Damned, 297)

Greene, after all, was nothing if not radical, even subversive, in his self-presentation. Always at odds with authority, not infrequently sued or censored or even banned, a bohemian and a truant, part exile and part émigré, a dissident Catholic and a sexual opportunist, … (298)

This seems doubly ungenerous when considered in the light of the epigraph from Leon Bloy with which Greene opened The End of the Affair: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” Is this creative agony available only to those who believe in transubstantiation? [301] To be fair to Greene, whose answer to that question was fairly obviously in the affirmative, one must admit that he extended the same indulgence to one other group: the Communists. … The theme of martyrdom is constant, even with these secular materialists. … Greene had briefly been a Party member while at Oxford, and although he was too intelligent and too prudent to remain a true adherent for long, he kept up a residual form… (302)

In the English past it had been considered “treasonous” to be a Roman Catholic. Official persecution was the underside of Elizabethan England. … So strongly did Greene identify with these reactionary subversives that he became a Shakespeare-hater, accusing the national bard of being an accomplice in repression, if only a silent one. … “Two years before, Shakespeare’s fellow poet Southwell had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty, we could have loved him better as a man.” (303)

Greene was unwaveringly hostile to the United States. (304)

…fatuous apologetics… (305)

…ever since the 1950s, when he indulged the Stalinist regime in Poland because it maintained a Catholic front organization called Pax Christi. (306)

The term “anti-American” is a loose one, and loosely employed. My own working definition of it, admittedly a slack one also, is that a person is anti-American if he ow she is consistently contemptuous of American culture and furthermore supports any opponent of U.S. policy, whoever this may be. (306)

Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as “muggle” and “Wizengamot,” and such names as Godric, Wulfric, and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of Beowulf could be revived. (Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived, 382)

The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. (382)

If I am correct about this, which I am, (Why Women Aren’t Funny, 394)

The Swedes are not the pacific herbivores that many people imagine: In the footnotes to his second novel Larsson reminds us that Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stockholm department store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the verdict in the second case has by no means satisfied everybody. (Stieg Larsson: The Author Who Played With Fire, 400)

Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being… unmanly. (As American as Apple Pie, 405)

…the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions. (When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.) The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man: the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ. The second edition occurs in Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten commandments.” In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses once more calls his audience together and recites the original Sinai speech with one highly significant alteration (the Sabbath commandment’s justifications in each differ greatly). But plainly discontented with the effect of this, he musters the flock again twenty-two chapters further on, as the river Jordan is coming into view, and gives an additional set of orders—chiefly terse curses—which are also to be inscribed in stone. (The New Commandments, 415)

(II) Then comes the prohibition of “graven images” or indeed “any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” This appears to forbid representational art, … It certainly seems to discourage Christian iconography, with its crucifixes, and statues of virgins and saints.) But the ban in obviously intended as a very emphatic one, since it comes with a reminder that I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. (415)

(IV) Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. … neither one’s children nor one’s servants or animals should be allowed to perform any tasks. (Query: Why is it is specifically addressed to people who are assumed to have staff?) … But in Exodus 20: 8-11, the reason given for the day off is that “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day.” Yet in Deuteronomy 5:15 a different reason for the Sabbath observance is offered: “Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD they God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.” … why can’t the infallible and omniscient one make up his mind what the real reason is? (416)

Thou shalt not kill. This very celebrated commandment quite obviously cannot mean what it seems to say in English translation. In the original Hebrew it comes across as something more equivalent to “Thou shalt do no murder.” (417)

Thou shalt not commit adultery. For some reason, “the seventh” is the only one of the commandments that is still widely known by its actual number. … Most criminal codes have long given up the attempt to make it a punishable offense in law: Its rewards and punishments are carefully administered by its practitioners and victims. (417-8)

Thou shalt not steal. … prosperity of some families and some states is also founded on original theft, … (418)

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. This is possibly the most sophisticated ruling of the whole Decalogue. Human society is inconceivable unless words are to some extent bonds, … Nothing focuses the attention more than a reminder that one is speaking on oath. … Note, also, how relatively flexible this commandment is. Its fulcrum is the “against.” If you are quite sure of somebody’s innocence and you shade the truth a little in the witness-box, you are no doubt technically guilty of perjury and may be privately troubled. But if you consciously lie in order to indict someone who is not guilty, you have done something irretrievably foul. (418-9)

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s. … Instead, this is the first but not the last introduction in the Bible of the totalitarian concept of “thought crime.” … Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament takes this a step further, announcing that those with lust in their heart have already committed the sin of adultery. In that case, you might as well be hung… Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey. … From the “left” point of view, how is it moral to prohibit… demanding a fairer distribution of wealth? From the “right” point of view, why is it wicked to be ambitious and acquisitive? And is not envy a great spur to emulation and competition? (419)

So then: how to prune…? (420)

For millions of people for thousands of years, the Sabbath was made a dreary burden of obligation and strict observance instead of a day of leisure or recreation. It also led to absurd hypocrisies that seem to treat God as a fool: He won’t notice is we make the elevators stop on every floor so that no pious Jew needs press a button. This is unwholesome and over-strenuous. (420)

As for Number Five, by all means respect for the elders, but why is there nothing to forbid child abuse? (Insolence on the part of children is punishable by death, according to Leviticus 20:9, only a few verses before the stipulation of the death penalty for male homosexuals.) A cruel or rude child is a ghastly thing, but a cruel or brutal parent can do infinitely more harm. Yet even in a long and exhaustive list of prohibitions, parental sadism or neglect is never once condemned. (420)

Number Seven … what about rape? It seems to be very strongly recommended, along with genocide, slavery, and infanticide, in Numbers 31: 1-18, and surely constitutes a rather extreme version or sex outside marriage. (421)

Number Ten … Sinister and despotic in that it cannot be obeyed and thus makes sinners even of quite thoughtful people. (421)

Burka. What about the Ku Klux Klan? … I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into a bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to. (In Your Face, 424)

…in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? (424)

Even in Iran there is only a requirement for the covering of hair, and I defy anybody to find any authority in the Koran for the concealment of the face. (425)

Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. (From Abbottabad to Worse, 475)

President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. (475)

There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. the two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. (475)

If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghams, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country? (479)

[end of an introduction] I have saved the word “British” for as long as I decently can. (The Perils of Partition, 481)

It was arguably fair, when Andre Maurois finished his Historie de la France, to permit him a small allowance of la glorie and to agree with his conclusion that “the history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.” (Algeria: A French Quarrel, 492)

Every move to reform Algeria even slightly was vetoed by a pied-noir lobby that was addicted to overplaying his own hand. (494)

Indeed, its chief strength lies precisely in showing the vagary [499] and variety of subject, and thus obliquely convicting any single unified critique of it as essentially reductionist… (The Case of Orientalism, 499-500)

And though it is true that the protracted Greek confrontation with the Persians created the first “East-West” division in the European mind, it is also true that the Greek word barbaros, with all its freight of later associations, was not a pejorative. It simply demarcated Greek-speaking form non-Greek-speaking peoples. So it was simplistic of Said to say that the roots of the problem lay with The Iliad: The Hellenes often looked down on uncouth northerners like the Scythians, while greatly admiring (and borrowing from) the Egyptians. (500)

To return, then, to Said. … Most of all, though, one must be ready to oppose any analysis that even slightly licenses the idea that “outsiders” are not welcome to study other cultures. So far form defending those cultures form depredation, such a stance actually permits them to fall under the dominance of stultified and conservative forces to whom everything depends on an affirmation of blind faith. (502-3)

This passage is rescued from sheer vulgarity only by its incoherence. The sole testable proposition (or nontautology) is the fantastic allegation that American forces powdered the artifacts of the Iraq museum in order to show who was boss. And the essential emptiness of putting the “our” in quotation marks, … (Edward Said: Where the Twain Should Have Met, 511)

In recent arguments in Washington about democracy and self-determination and pluralism, it seemed to me that the visiting Iraqi and Kurdish activists had a lot more to teach than to learn. (511)

…the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. (Worse Than Nineteen Eighty-four, 553)

Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no free-world propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north. (554)

Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea’s food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subject that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader. (North Korea: A Nation of Racist Dwarves, 557)

The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with their lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard care and nutrition in the “wider” society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. (558)

…a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. (558)

…the closing third of the nineteenth century, after which it was possible to begin thinking of the United States as a global power. (The Case for Humanitarian Intervention, 574)

Many also forget that the international campaign in solidarity with the Union under the Lincoln presidency rallied at a time when it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom might have thrown its whole weight behind the Confederacy and even moved troops form Canada to hasten the partition of a country half slave and half free. This is often forgotten, I suggest, because the movement of solidarity was partly led by Karl Marx and his European allies (as was gratefully acknowledged by Henry Adams in his Education) and because the boycott of Confederate goods, the blocking of shipbuilding orders for the Confederate fleet, and other such actions were to some degree orchestrated by the founders of the communist movement—not the sort of thing that is taught in school when Abraham Lincoln is the patriotic subject. Marx and Freidrich Engels hugely admired Lincoln and felt that just as Russia was the great arsenal of backwardness, reaction, and superstition, the United States was the land of potential freedom and equality. (574)

…the antique Shia concept of taqqiya, or the religious permission to dissemble in dealings with infidels. (The Persian Version, 621)

In his superb memoir, Experience (2000), Martin Amis almost casually expends a terrific line in a minor footnote. Batting away a critic he describes as “humorless,” he adds, “And by calling him humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” (Martin Amis: Lightness at Midnight, 625)

(The frightful mustache was grown partly to distract attention from his rotting fangs and suppurating gums.) In the same way, he abhorred smoking, was a fanatical vegetarian, and would never allow jokes about sex in his presence. (Imagining Hitler, 642)

The maddening thought that, in other circumstances, he could have been such an ordinary bore and nuisance? The man’s opinions are trite and bigoted and deferential, and the prose in Mein Kampf is simply laughable in its pomposity. (642)

You can chuck out your Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest and Hugh Trevor Roper biographies, in my opinion, and read only one relatively short book: The Meaning of Hitler, by the brave, brilliant former German exile Sebastian Haffner. In one dense paragraph, written in 1978, before the Kershaw disclosures, he guessed correctly that Hitler’s maniacal reaction to the Munich revolution in 1918-19 was the key that unlocked everything. Read it carefully, because it leaves noting out:
“There must never again be and there will never again be a November 1918 in Germany,” was his first political resolution after a great many political ponderings and speculations. It was the first specific objective the young private politicians set himself and incidentally the only one he truly accomplished. There was certainly no November 1918 in the Second World War—neither a timely termination of a lost war nor a revolution. Hitler prevented both. /
Let us be clear about what this “never again a November 1918” implied. It implied quite a lot. First of all the determination to make impossible any future revolution in a situation analogous to November 1918. Secondly—since otherwise the first point be left in the air—the determination to bring about once more a similar situation. And this implied, thirdly, the resumption of the war that was lost or believed to be lost. Fourthly, the war had to be resumed on the basis of a domestic constitution in which there were no potentially revolutionary forces. From here it was not far to the fifth point, the abolition of all Left-wing parties, and indeed why not, while one was about it, of all parties. Since, however, one could not abolish the people behind the Left-wing parties, the workers, they would have to be politically won over to nationalism, and this implied, sixth, that one had to offer them socialism, or at least a kind of socialism, in fact National Socialism. Seventh, their former faith, Marxism, had to be uprooted and that meant—eighth—the physical annihilation of the Marxist politicians and intellectuals who, fortunately, included quite a lot of Jews so that—ninth, and Hitler’s oldest wish—one could also, at the same time, exterminate all the Jews. (646)

It’s known that he had a brutal father and a doting mother, but as Kershaw carefully shows, there is no serious foundation to the rumors of hidden Jewish ancestry, … (649)

Yet deep within himself, Haffner argues, Hitler did not trust the German people, or think them worthy of his leadership. With outright military catastrophe threatening in 1944, he ordered the arrest of 5,000 leading German politicians, from minister to mayor (including the highly conservative politician Konrad Adenauer, later to become the first West German chancellor), because he thought they might go soft, and even sue for peace, and perhaps allow another November 1918 defeat. He kept his Final Solution a state secret, to be conducted well away from German soil—a compliment to public opinion in its way—and, at the end, coldly decided that Germany itself should be laid to waste as a punishment for its weakness. (650)

…splendid book called In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, by Professor Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel. This volume establishes conclusively that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was no duped “appeaser,” with a silly mustache of his own. He had made a cold calculation that Hitler should be re-armed, and be allowed—if not, indeed, encouraged—to expand his Reich. This was partly to keep his marauding hands off the British Empire, and partly to encourage his “tough-minded” solution to the Bolshevik problem in the East. Chamberlain and his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, refused even to meet with senior German officers who belatedly implored their help, at the last available moment, in overthrowing the madman. The German people, said these brave men, said these brave men, had been partly duped by Hitler because he had apparently restored full employment and overturned the unpopular and humiliating Treaty of Versailles, destroy their illusion, and there were several generals ready to move against their former protégé. (651)

Banish your sentimentality (and I have left out the most heart-touching passages) : Is there not something fabulously grotesque about a regime that in the midst of total war will pedantically insist that Jews and their spouses either euthanize their own pets or surrender them to the state for extermination? (Victor Klemperer: Survivor, 655)

It all sounds oddly…Churchillian. The old lion himself never tired of striking notes like these, and was quite unembarrassed by invocations of race and nation and blood. Yet he is the object of Buchanan’s especial dislike and contempt, because he had a fondness for “wars of choice.” (A War Worth Fighting, 662)

If you want to demonstrate that Germany was more the victim than the aggressor in 1914, then you must confine your account (as Buchanan does) to the very minor legal question of Belgian neutrality… (663)

As General Douglas MacArthur once put it, all military defeats can be summarized in two words: “Too late.” (666)

It’s quite another thing to say that the Nazi decision to embark on a Holocaust of European Jewry was “not a cause of the war but an awful consequence of the war.” Not only is Buchanan claiming that Hitler’s fanatical racism did not hugely increase the likelihood of war, but he is also making the insinuation that those who wanted to resist him are the ones who are equally if not indeed mainly responsible for themurder of the Jews! This absolutely will not do. (666)

Some reviewers have expressed shock or even disbelief at evidence that Baker has adduced, … I myself, however, grew increasingly impatient with Baker’s assumption of his own daring transgressiveness. (Just Give Peace a Chance, 670)

Gandhi… an open letter he wrote to the British people on July 3, 1940. “Your soliders are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans,” wrote the Mahatma. “I want you to fight Nazism without arms.” He went on to say: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to own allegiance to them.” (671)

On two pages to which I call your attention—pages 204 and 233—Nicholson Baker leaves the distinct impression that Hitler would have been content to ship all Europe’s Jews to somewhere like Madagascar and would have done so were it not for Churchill’s awful belligerence. You are perfectly free to believe this yourself, should you choose. (672)

Indeed, the little matter of democracy is entirely ignored by the self-satisfied Baker analysis. Not only are Britain and America discussed as if they were little if any better than the dictatorships of the time, but we are never even faced with the question of how much force would ever be justifiable in a war to the finish between the pluralist and the absolutist principle (in which the absolutist principle was, lest we forget, rather convincingly vanquished). (672)

When the envoys of the anti-Nazi officers corps visited London at the eleventh hour, they came to tell Chamberlain and Halifax that they could overthrow and imprison their demented Fuhrer, as long as Britain could be counted on to say, and to mean, that it could and would fight for Prague. If you want to avoid a very big and very bad war later, be prepared to fight a small and principled war now. (672)

Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. (When the King Saved God, 689)

For example, in Isaiah 7:14 it is stated that “behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” This is the scriptural warrant and prophecy for the impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. But the original Hebrew wording refers only to the pregnancy of an almah, or young woman. If the Hebrew language wants to identify virginity, it has other terms in which to do so. (691)

And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home… Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.” /
At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (693)

…the King James Bible slowly overhauled and overtook the Geneva version, and, as the Pilgrim-type mini-theocracies of New England withered away, became one of the very few books from which almost any American could quote something. (694)

Those who opposed the translation of the Bible into the vernacular—were afraid that the mystic potency of incantation and ritual would be lost, and that daylight would be let in upon magic. They also feared that if God’s word became too everyday and commonplace it would become less impressive, or less able to inspire awe. But the reverse turns out to have been the case, at least in this instance. (695)

Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton phrase matters this way: “One of the innovative developments in the white English of Californians is the use of the discourse-marker ‘I’m like’ or ‘she’s like’ to introduce quoted speech, as in ‘I’m like, where have you been?’n This quotative is particularly useful because it does not require the quote to be of actual speech (as ‘she said’ would, for instance). (The Other L-Word, 737)

The actual grammatical battle was probably lost as far back as 1954, when Winston announced that its latest smoke “tasted good, like a cigarette should.” Complaints from sticklers that this should have been “as a cigarette should” (or, in my view, “as a cigarette ought to do”) … How could one preserve what’s useful about “like” without allowing it to reduce everyday vocabulary and without having it weaken the two strong senses of the word, which are: to be fond of something or somebody (As You Like, Like It) or to resemble something or somebody (“Like, Like a Virgin”)? (738)