Phoenix, Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright died in.
Learning from the Divine Comedy that one-way traffic had been established in thirteenth-century Rome.
Within weeks of John Berryman’s father’s suicide, when Berryman was twelve, his mother remarried. To their landlord.
Books agreeing with Copernicus or Kepler or Galileo — i.e., acknowledging that the earth moved around the sun — remained on the Catholic Index until as late as 1835.
One’s delayed awareness that in Hamlet, Claudius prays. Or attempts to.
And that Hamlet never does.
Are you actually the Arnold Schoenberg.
Somebody had to be.
Pliny the Younger was a pupil of Quintilian’s.
Years afterward, learning that Quintilian could not afford a proper dowry for his daughter, Pliny sent the money as a gift.
Dryden was England’s first official Poet Laureate.
One hundred and seventy-five years earlier, both Oxford and Cambridge had awarded the title to John Skelton.
Fifteen thousand children were among the prisoners who passed through Theresienstadt.
Ninety-some survived.
The probability that James Joyce and Lenin exchanged pleasantries.
In a Café Odéon in Zurich, in 1915, which both spent much time in.
Pascal could see no worth whatsoever in poetry.
The original of Lady Macbeth. Whose name was Gruoch.
Yeats, in the mid-1930s, noting that he had met Gerard Manley Hopkins several times more than fifty years earlier, but remembered almost nothing:
A boy of seventeen, Walt Whitman in his pocket, had little interest in a querulous, sensitive scholar.
At thirty-three, with a number of what would become his most famous poems already written, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s total lifetime earnings as an author came to seven dollars.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in the year 2000, on the Holocaust:
A fairy tale.
Handel wrote Messiah in twenty-two days.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.
Said Gertrude Stein.
Vasari’s painful single-sentence description of an aging Piero di Cosimo, struggling to continue painting while suffering from palsy — and enraged when the maulstick and even his brushes would fall from his hand.
Renoir’s arthritis.
27, rue de Fleurus.
Benvenuto Cellini had at least six illegitimate children.
The proposal that Dylan Thomas would sleep on a couch in Stravinsky’s Los Angeles living room while they collaborated on an opera.
Precluded by Thomas’s death.
The King Lear that Verdi always hoped to write but didn’t.
Remembering that the Chinese invented moveable type well before Gutenberg.
As did the Koreans.
Poaching venison and rabbits from Sir Thomas Lucy.
Too raw for the majority of women.
Said Sainte-Beuve of Madame Bovary.
Writing in bed, Mark Twain preferred.
Fretful, timorous, and a tell-tale — Coleridge’s own description of his childhood self.
The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.
Schrödinger’s equation.
Pausing to recall that before watches became commonplace, one told time by heeding church bells. Or when possible by sundial.
As in the London of John Donne or of Samuel Pepys, for example.
Copies of all of the now long lost plays of Sophocles and Euripides still existed at Constantinople until 1203.
When the city’s churches and libraries were indiscriminately ravaged and torched by the abortive Fourth Crusade.
According to Suetonius, Virgil first wrote the entire Aeneid in prose — and only then recast it into verse.
From an earliest major review of Jane Eyre:
Sheer rudeness and vulgarity. An anti-Christian composition.
Of Wuthering Heights:
Repulsive vulgarity. Odiously and abominably pagan.
Herefordshire, Jenny Lind died in.
Poor Tom’s a-cold.
At Lamb House, in Rye, Henry James had no fewer than eight writing desks.
And most often paced back and forth dictating.
Johnson. Boswell. Gibbon. Walpole. Goldsmith. Sterne. Garrick. Edmund Burke. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sarah Siddons.
All of whom sat for Joshua Reynolds.
Napoleon. Louis XVI. Catherine the Great. Rousseau. Voltaire. Washington. Jefferson. Franklin. John Paul Jones. Diderot. Lafayette.
All of whom sat for Jean-Antoine Houdon.
By order of the Council of Avignon, 1209, forbidden to handle bread or fruit set out for sale:
Harlots and Jews.
There were 945 booksellers in Paris in 1845.
Tolstoy carried on a vast correspondence. In 1908, Thomas Edison sent him an early dictaphone. Tolstoy learned to make great use of it, in the two years until his death.
Goethe’s English spelling:
I am luky.
The best dramatic writer since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger, Walter Scott called Joanna Baillie.
Who was forgotten before her death.
Fragonard was so little known at his death that there would appear to have been no obituary anywhere.
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Beaumarchais, who wrote The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville—and who surreptitiously arranged for the sale of muskets and cannon and gunpowder to the Americans during the Revolution.
And was never paid until an Act of Congress compensated his heirs sixty years later.
Donne would not last, Drummond of Hawthornden says Ben Jonson said.
For not being understood.
An uninteresting, and one may almost say, a justly exterminated race.
The New York Times called the American Indian, in an 1855 review of Hiawatha.
An amiable barbarian. Voltaire called Shakespeare.
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
The reading or non-reading of a book — will never keep down a single petticoat.
Said Byron.
Stevie Smith’s cheerfully gruesome voice, Robert Lowell called it.
There are no English critics of weight or judgment who consider Mr. Joyce an author of any importance.
Said Edmund Gosse, two years after the publication of Ulysses.
Who can plow through such stuff?
Added George Moore.
The best thing that could happen to English literature is that a large number of our critics should be taken to a remote place in the country and locked up alone for six months with a volume of Wordsworth.