After which Gibbon never spoke to him again.
Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe all once worked together in the same German architectural studio.
For approximately a century and a half, Vivaldi was as little known and little rated among composers as was Vermeer for even longer among painters.
Vermeer having evidently been mentioned in print only three times in his life, and all three inconsequentially.
The friendship of Parson Malthus and David Ricardo.
Under the Caesars, a virgin could not be executed.
Thus any so sentenced were matter-of-factly deflowered beforehand.
At a doctor’s suggestion, Mozart went horseback riding every morning for four years.
Ceasing a month or two before his death when he was forced to sell his mount — for need of the few ducats.
Louvain, Dirck Bouts died in.
John Ruskin, educated at home, had no friends among boys of his own age.
John Stuart Mill, the same.
Much too early I came to many places, or too late: the beer was not yet ready, or was already drunk.
Says Odin, in the Elder Edda.
The era when postage was still paid for by the person who received the delivery.
And Scott said that his fan mail was driving him toward the poorhouse.
Byron, briefly, on Southey: Twaddle.
On Wordsworth: Drivel.
On Keats: Flay him alive.
At certain moments in his madness, John Clare was heard to hold conversations with Shakespeare.
When Hölderlin talked to himself it was often as if in a dialogue between two extraordinarily different personalities.
Thomas Love Peacock read voraciously in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course English.
Having left school at thirteen.
There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.
Says Terence in the Eunuch.
We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.
Says Burton in the Anatomy.
Jonson’s To Celia—Drink to me only with thine eyes.
Which he contrived by juggling fragments from the Greek of Philostratus.
James Ensor’s portrait of himself as a beetle.
Drawn twenty-four years before The Metamorphosis.
Sakyamuni.
Mendelssohn, on Liszt:
Few brains.
On Berlioz:
One ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores.
Paul Robeson’s father was a former slave.
Sigmund Freud was one of those who categorically refused to allow that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have been the author of the plays.
And told Arnold Zweig that it almost made him angry that Zweig believed otherwise.
The Athenian general Phocion, who was interrupted by extraordinary cheering during a speech:
Have I inadvertently said something stupid?
Huckleberry Finn is thirteen.
Raskolnikov is twenty-three.
Winslow Homer was an artist-correspondent at the front during the Civil War.
Schopenhauer was someone else who talked to himself — loudly, on public thoroughfares.
In Wordsworth’s instance the talk meant that he was composing verses — which he completed in his head before putting them down on paper.
Entirely fourth-rate — Tchaikovsky re Handel.
Pushkin’s tentative English — much of it learned by struggling through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Molly Bloom is thirty-three.
Have the people who conclude that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford ever read the poetry Oxford actually did write?
The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. Ergo, the twenty-four books of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.
Arranged by editors at Alexandria centuries after the fact.
When you are going to bed on a sleeper car, put your wallet in a sock under your pillow. That way, in the morning you’ll never forget your wallet, because you’ll be looking for your sock.
Said Ping Bodie.
Eliot was not a very experienced writer, he didn’t write very much, he didn’t write very much poetry.
Said Allen Ginsberg.
Every poet is a fool. Which is not to say that every fool is a poet.
Said Coleridge.
Teresa Stratas, who in midcareer took time to work in Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta.
And later in orphanages in Romania.
Was Stalin’s right arm withered, or was it his left?
Jerusalem, Martin Buber died in.
As did Else Lasker-Schiller.
And S. Y. Agnon.
And Yehuda Amichai.
Paradise Lost sold fewer than three hundred copies a year in its first ten years in print.
The Courtship of Miles Standish sold fifteen thousand copies on its first day.
Giacomo Puccini’s fanatic addiction to duck hunting.
There is no peace to be found except in the woods.
Said Michelangelo.
Herodotus claimed that Nebuchadnezzar’s walls at Babylon were thick enough so that two four-horse chariots could traverse them side by side. No one believed him for twenty-four hundred years — until excavation showed them thicker than that.
Swinburne suffered epileptic seizures. Once in the British Museum.
The United States Constitution was formally declared to be in effect in March of 1789. At a celebration in Philadelphia, provision was made for tables serving kosher food.
Van Dyck was known to do many of his portraits in no longer than an hour.
It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier.
Said Emerson.
There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.
Said Tocqueville.
Is Suetonius the first writer ever known to make a reference to Christianity?
Revolting immorality.
Said an earliest Italian response to Rigoletto.
Like mending a sewer and setting it to music.
Said a New York newspaper of the Anvil Chorus in a first American review of Il Trovatore.
Are there still cedars in Lebanon?
Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in sixth-century Rome who calculated the birth of Christ as having occurred 531 years earlier — and for the first time designated the years since as anni Domini nostri.
Is this the little woman who made this great war?
Said Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe.
To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, Hemingway told Charles Scribner, I fucked three times, shot ten straight pigeons (very fast ones) at the club, drank with friends a case of Piper Heidsieck brut and looked the ocean for big fish all afternoon.