Tacitus, on Britain, a century after the Roman conquest:
A rude, scattered, and warlike people.
Hemingway was extremely slow to offer a guest a drink, said Virgil Thomson.
Schiller, writing to tell Goethe that Kant would contribute to a periodical he was editing—
And referring to Kant as the old bird.
Cleopatra never learned to speak Latin.
Evidently bedding Caesar and Antony via Greek.
The friendship of Picasso and Stravinsky.
Orbilius, a teacher of grammar. Remembered for two thousand years because Horace was one of his pupils — and named him the Whacker, for thrashings with his switch.
A letter written in Asia Minor, in 1615, and eventually delivered in London to:
The right worshipful fraternity of sirenical gentlemen, that meet the first Friday of every month, at the sign of the Mermaid in Bread Street.
January 1889, in Turin. Nietzsche, weeping, throws his arms around the neck of a mare being beaten by a coachman and then collapses in the street. Essentially the point of no return into his final madness.
To dress before her long-remembered 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Marian Anderson had to seek out someone’s private home:
The Washington hotels would not take us.
Dostoievsky’s profound, criminal, saintly face, Thomas Mann remarks.
Trash, Lenin viewed him as.
A volume of Sherlock Holmes, which fictional Leopold Bloom has borrowed from a Dublin library and which is thirteen days overdue on fictional June 16, 1904, was listed as missing by the actual library in 1906.
380 AD Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople — ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.
1073 AD Pope Gregory VII — ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.
Why is Orestes so central in so much of surviving Greek drama?
Or should the question be why bloodying one’s mother was so popular a topic?
The man’s simplicity was nothing short of astounding.
Said Abélard, regarding the uncle of Héloise who arranged for him to actually move into their home while tutoring her.
The inner truth and greatness of Nazism, Martin Heidegger spoke of.
A fatherly type, Knut Hamsun called Hitler.
Erich Kleiber held more than 130 rehearsals before conducting the world premiere of Wozzeck at the Berlin State Opera in 1925.
We are dealing here, from a musical viewpoint, with a capital offense, said one of the next morning’s reviews.
Youngsters, marching in what they announce as Indian file.
Who hearing them would know that the phrase comes from Fenimore Cooper?
Nahum Tate’s once regularly staged version of King Lear.
In which Cordelia and Edgar fall in love and live happily ever after.
I have met no one who has seen a sea on the west side of Europe. The truth is, no one has discovered if Europe is surrounded by water or not.
Said Herodotus, ca. 445 BC.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning so admired George Sand that she knelt and kissed her hand when they met.
Which Beethoven had once done with Haydn.
Geoffrey Chaucer was once accused of rape. And paid an unrecorded sum for the woman to withdraw her suit.
Coleridge, in acute financial need during a period of his severest addiction to opium, was given an anonymous gift of one hundred pounds.
From Thomas De Quincey.
Homer himself left no inheritance.
Said Ovid’s father, wishing his son might pursue a more remunerative occupation.
The erotic drawings that John Ruskin came upon in Turner’s studio after Turner’s funeral — and burned.
The seventy or more drawings by Degas of women from Paris brothels — with which one of Degas’ brothers did the same.
In research for his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel read fifteen thousand James letters.
Including those on which the frequent exhortation Burn this, please had obviously been ignored.
Why does it seem like the earliest fragment of American history that Author can remember ever having learned—
That Dolley Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington when the British burned the White House in 1814?
Is Plautus the first author ever to refer to Alexander of Macedon as Alexander the Great?
Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig.
As the best musicians are not available, we must accept a man of moderate ability — had said a member of the Leipzig Municipal Council in hiring him.
Isadora Duncan lost two children when a chauffeur forgot to set the brake while cranking an automobile and it lurched into the Seine.
Alle Menschen müssen sterben.
In the First Pythian Ode, Pindar describes an eruption of Mount Etna.
In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus describes an eruption of Mount Etna.
In Aeneid III, Virgil describes an eruption of Mount Etna.
But I will pull out of all this in Taormina. Under Etna, wait and see.
Said Malcolm Lowry, depressed after an eviction and awaiting freighter passage from New York to Sicily.
Asses loaded with books.
Mohammed, who could not read or write, dismissed the ews as.
Emily Dickinson left behind 1,775 poems.
Meaning a fraction less than one per week from every week of her adult life.
Dolley Madison also saved the silver.
How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?
Nothing written by Dante’s hand is known to exist — no manuscript, no document of any sort, nor is there even a signature.
Cf. six authenticated signatures of Shakespeare’s — among other items.
Athens, in the era of the ranking dramatists, or even as late as Plato, had no public library.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture — for wild beasts to fight in.
Grumbled Voltaire.
At certain seasons he kept those boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away altogether with the leather.
Said Ascanio Condivi, a friend of Michelangelo’s.
As if painted with mud. Hideous. Irremediable. Like the designs schoolchildren make by squeezing flies between the folds of a sheet of paper. Worse.
Being but few of the more typical critical comments on Cezanne in the year or so before his death.
Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie had an eighth-grade education.
Nora Joyce had a year or two less.
Among Annabella Milbanke’s charges, when seeking a separation from Byron:
That he shot off pistols in a drawing room while she lay one floor above in labor.
Truman Capote could not publish In Cold Blood until the two murderers, with whom he had become inordinately intimate, were executed.