Coleridge’s. De Quincey’s.
Poe’s.
The Nike of Samothrace, in the Louvre, which was excavated in 1863 — in more than one hundred fragments.
Newspapers expressed such indignation over the ostensible immorality in Richard Strauss’s Salome at its 1907 American premiere that the opera was withdrawn after a single performance and not produced again at the Metropolitan until 1934.
Diseased and polluted. Indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable. Unspeakable.
Read a small portion of what the New York Times had to contribute.
Aristide Maillol’s practice of repeatedly urinating on his bronze sculptures.
To add patina.
If you value my work, please, do not knock.
Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse’s door in Ticino.
Gérard de Nerval, in some of the milder moments of his madness — known to toss such money as he possessed into the air for anyone’s taking in restaurants and coffeehouses.
Anne Sexton’s periods in mental institutions.
Only native-born citizens in ancient Athens were allowed to own property.
Meaning that no less a personage than Aristotle, from Stagira, could not.
The nunnery on Montmartre, mentioned a few years earlier by François Villon, where in 1503 it was discovered that the abbess and several nuns had borne children — and still others were pregnant.
A fiend of a book. The action is laid in Hell — only it seems places and people have English names there.
Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.
Olive Fremstad. Mary Garden. Ljuba Welitsch. Karita Matilla.
Wagner played the piano badly.
Berlioz not at all.
For safety’s sake during the bombings of World War II, the Elgin Marbles were removed from the British Museum and stored deep in the London subway system.
While the French Resistance during those same years was using the Lascaux cave as a place in which to cache weapons.
Tchaikovsky was found weeping after he had written the death of Lisa in The Queen of Spades.
Georges Bernanos was married to a direct descendant of a brother of Joan of Arc.
A simple creature unlettyrde.
Julian of Norwich called herself.
The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.
Echoed Jane Austen — four hundred years afterward.
Pastor Martin Niemöller — who spent seven years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.
After having been a German U-boat commander in World War I.
April 13, 1945, Ernst Cassirer died on.
Ivan Goncharov worked in the Russian Civil Service for his entire adult life.
Mussorgsky, the same.
Then again, quoting himself or not, Novelist naturally does receive some few phone calls after all.
All too often in these years with news of someone’s death, however.
Leonardo’s peculiar habit of surreptitiously following interesting-looking strangers on the street.
To be able to sketch them from memory later, the contemporary assumption was.
Christianity must be divine, since it has lasted seventeen hundred years despite the fact of being so full of villainy and absurdity.
Voltaire said.
The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.
Voltaire also said.
Slop, Pound was calling Yeats’s recent verse in the mid-1930s — after having been best man at Yeats’s wedding two decades earlier.
The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep — although almost wholly malign.
Said Edmund Gosse.
There is no indication whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling a State of Israel on the maps in most contemporary Arab schoolbooks.
Sixty-seven, Cézanne died at.
Some few days after having been caught for hours in a sudden downpour where he had been at work on a landscape.
A sort of God of painting.
Matisse was to call him.
One can now hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer.
Proclaimed Debussy in delight at the advent of the phonograph.
They who drink beer will think beer.
Said Washington Irving.
Cracked, Edith Sitwell called Blake.
Flaubert’s outrage at the notion of an illustrated edition of Bovary.
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again.
Still the most avant-garde book ever written.
Anthony Burgess said of Tristram Shandy.
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
Johnson said.
Mahler died in 1911. Alma not until 1964.
Beckett, on the posthumous publication of letters or other papers that their authors might not have approved of:
When a writer dies his widow should be burned on his funeral pyre.
To publish one line of an author which he himself did not intend for publication — especially letters — is a despicable act.
Had said Heine earlier.
What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.
I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.
It is never difficult to paint, said Dalí.
It is either easy or impossible.
Willie Yeats, he was frequently called.
William Cuthbert Faulkner, his full name was.
Christopher Marlowe evidently wrote Tamburlaine while still a student at Cambridge.
Learn or leave. A third alternative is to be flogged.
Declared a Latin inscription at the entrance to a church-sponsored Medieval English elementary school.
Rousseau’s father was a watchmaker.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died of breast cancer.
Too much interest in music could turn one effeminate.
Kant said.
Tolstoy’s certainty that Darwin was already beginning to be forgotten.
As early as in 1903.
Hugh Kenner’s sense of the same re Freud.
Whom he called already nearly as dated as Trilby — in 1958.
Goyisher kopf.
Byron, with amiable confidence, to friends whose silence suggested that they did not particularly admire Don Juan:
I wish you all better taste.
The ugliness of some of his music is really masterly.
Stated a London journal after an early Delius concert.
Andromache. Alcestis. Helen. Medea. The Bacchae.
Each of which Euripides ends with his chorus speaking an identical verse — to the effect that the ways of the gods are unpredictable.
Helen, the most famous woman in Greek mythology — whose name is not a Greek name.
The curiosity that we possess copies of ten evidently authentic letters of Dante’s — and not one of Shakespeare’s.
August 11, 1494, Hans Memling died on.
Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday, Sylvia Plath was born on.
I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood.
Strolling on Park Avenue in New York, John Gielgud unexpectedly runs into Greta Garbo — Looking like a displaced charwoman, he later reports.
Edgell Rickword lost an eye as an officer in France in World War I.
Siegfried Sassoon was wounded twice.
Thinking with someone else’s brain.
Schopenhauer called reading.
In the late spring of 1944, at the height of their efficiency, the forty-six ovens in the crematoriums at Auschwitz were incinerating as many as twelve thousand corpses per day.