Addison and Steele were schoolboys together.
As were Jonathan Swift and William Congreve.
As were John Dryden and John Locke.
Blake’s portraits of Mohammed, Canute, Owen Glendower, Wat Tyler, Lot, William Wallace, and others.
All of whom he insisted had posed for him, in visitations.
The occasions during their collaboration when Braque and Picasso could not always say with certainty which cubist canvas had been the work of whom.
My ex-wife, Picasso would later speak of Braque as.
Beethoven was once seen to throw a dish at a servant. And again at a waiter.
My musical career would no doubt at last become quite charming, if only I could live one hundred and fifty years.
Said Berlioz, when he finally began to receive the critical esteem he deserved.
François Villon’s mother was illiterate.
As was Walt Whitman’s.
As was D. H. Lawrence’s father.
Not long after Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Scribner’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print.
And then rejected the collection called The Crack-Up.
I am Cinna the poet. I am not Cinna the conspirator.
Claude Monet’s love of the sea:
When I die, I should like to be buried in a buoy.
Heinrich Heine’s grave in Montmartre was deliberately despoiled by the Nazis in World War II.
An image that has lingered in Author’s mind: Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, some few years afterward, silently bearing flowers to the site.
Almost nothing whatever is known about Livy.
Rome’s historian has no history, as Taine put it.
Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius either.
Ignoring Saint Jerome’s silliness about him having been driven mad by a love potion.
Zora Neale Hurston’s jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by telling the police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her.
The Calvary sculpted by Claus Sluter in the late fourteenth century which included the figure of Jeremiah — wearing eyeglasses.
Be silent, good people. I am the Protestant whore.
Called Nell Gwyn out a carriage window to an anti-Catholic London mob.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Whose 1944 Free French reconnaissance flight went down without a sign somewhere off Corsica.
Where they burn books, they’ll end up burning people, said Heine.
In 1821.
The painter’s painter, Whistler called Velazquez.
Everything that Velazquez does may be regarded as absolutely right, said Ruskin.
Leopold Bloom, thinking of the overheard tinkle into a chamber pot as a kind of chamber music.
The likelihood that Joyce adopted the title for his poems from the same pun.
Tamerlane, in 1398, seeking justification in the Koran for an attack on Delhi and given a verse by the mullahs: 0 Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with harshness.
Whereupon he massacred one hundred thousand unarmed prisoners.
The First Crusade, achieving Jerusalem three hundred years before that, as witnessed by the priest Raymond of Agiles:
Wonderful things were to be viewed. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded. Others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet.
A decorator tainted with insanity, Harper’s Weekly once called Gauguin.
Whitman never saw Europe.
Wallace Stevens did not either.
Thunder occurs when clouds collide.
Said Anaxagoras.
Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!
Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer.
Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also.
Thanks to God, I have always remained an athiest.
Said Luis Buñuel.
Euripides died in Macedonia. Athens subsequently sent formal emissaries asking that his remains be returned for burial in his homeland. Macedonia said no, electing to retain the honor.
Tchaikovsky’s utterly ill-conceived marriage, which lasted only weeks.
And in fleeing from which he initially attempted suicide — and then underwent a nervous breakdown.
Physics is much too difficult for me. I wish I were a film comedian.
Said Wolfgang Pauli.
Kuesnacht, near Zurich, Carl Jung died in.
The correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.
Initiated by Eliot.
Vesalius passed his final examinations at the University of Padua with such astonishingly high grades that the following morning he was appointed a professor of surgery.
For all that later sensibilities would find it mawkish, Dickens himself always wept when he read the death of Little Nell in public.
Puccini admitted that he did the same after writing Mimi’s death in La Bohème.
From a letter of 1682, to the effect that a ship carrying Quakers is en route to Cape Cod:
Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked. Yours in the bowels of Christ—
Cotton Mather.
Forks were first introduced in England in 1611.
Which is to say, about the time Shakespeare was writing The Winter’s Tale and/or The Tempest and preparing to retire to Stratford.
Milton treated his three daughters so sternly that when he decided to marry for a third time, one of them said that news of a wedding was of no consequence:
But might I hear of his death, that were something.
Realizing that through the entire Middle Ages, Italian merchants still kept their books in Roman numerals.
The curiosity that Jesus never appears to condemn slavery, though mentioning it in passing more than once.
The best-selling novels in five of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century were by Winston Churchill.
An earlier Winston Churchill.
There are eighty-six chapters in Middlemarch.
And eighty-six epigraphs.
For years, Vachel Lindsay sold his poetry on street corners. The first time he did so, in New York in 1905, he took in thirteen cents.
And was overjoyed.
No single book or manuscript is listed among Shakespeare’s possessions in his will.
There was a man and a dog too this time.
The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.
Hackenbush.
Hobbes. Descartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.
Not one of whom ever married.
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,