Exceptionally shy, Virgil was known to be. In part because of a stutter.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s first teacher was the portrait painter Bonnat.
Who called his efforts abominable.
An explosion in a cesspool, Paul Elmer More called Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer.
The G-String Murders.
Why does Author not know if what used to be named Arbor Day is still celebrated?
Until he was almost fifty, Rousseau was forced to earn a living as a music copyist.
At least four popes have been assassinated.
Historical details regarding the Amazons were left by both the Greeks and the Persians but ceased with the Romans — as if they had abruptly disappeared.
Has it ever been verified that they existed?
Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller that Sartre.
Luca Signorelli, at the sudden death of a young son — having the corpse stripped and making a full-length drawing of the boy for remembrance.
And with extraordinary fortitude, shedding not a tear, Vasari says.
Haarlem, Frans Hals died in.
This book on which I have grown thin through all these years, Dante speaks of.
A strict accounting of even the most trivial household expense, Hegel was said to keep.
To the last pfennig.
Cleopatra, in a burka.
Joan, in a burka.
Marilyn.
Albert Camus was having lunch in a Paris restaurant when he was informed he had won the Nobel Prize. By his waiter.
The pretense in speaking of second-rate 1940s Hollywood melodramas as film noir classics.
Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Oscar Williams’ long-popular Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, dated 1946.
Containing five poems by Wallace Stevens, four by Ezra Pound, four by Marianne Moore, two by William Carlos Williams — and nine by Oscar Williams.
But I kissed her little sister,
And forgot my Clementine.
Gus Broberg. Bob Davies. Arnold Ferrin.
He who follows another will never overtake him.
Said Michelangelo.
If you are alone, you are wholly your own.
Said Leonardo.
Swinburne’s pronouncement that he was a better poetic dramatist than Euripides.
Scott, proposed as Poet Laureate — but calling the entire concept ridiculous.
Byron, mocking Southey for accepting the position.
Browning condemning Wordsworth for the same.
Saussure’s doctoral dissertation: On the use of the genitive case in Sanskrit.
Madame Tussaud began a death mask of Robespierre only instants after his severed head was handed down from the guillotine.
The era when books were still chained to desks or lecterns in certain libraries.
Hashshasheen. Assassin.
Diogenes, explaining why people give to beggars, but not to philosophers:
Because they think it possible that they themselves might become lame or blind, but they do not expect to turn out philosophers.
New Haven, Connecticut, Hermann Broch died in.
A thoroughly superficial book with all the profundity of Rebecca.
Scott Fitzgerald called For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father was a rabbi.
The insistence of both Plutarch and Arrian that the Persians under Darius III at Issus lost 120,000 men — to Alexander’s 450.
The feminist character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm whose name Cicily Isabel Fairfield borrowed as a pseudonym — to become Rebecca West.
Philomela.
To spend too much time in Studies is Sloth; To use them too much for Ornament is Affectation.
Said Bacon.
Janet Baker. Marilyn Horne. Grace Bumbry.
All of whom attended master classes with Lotte Lehmann.
Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston went to high school together.
I certify that this vehicle has been inspected and that there are no children left on board.
Auden’s first volume of poems — and Stephen Spender’s — were both published by Spender himself on a small hand-operated press.
Charon. Who charged an obolus for the ferry ride across the Styx.
Christina Rossetti’s pet wombat.
Disappointment to this day that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau never sang at the Metropolitan.
Genghis Khan had five hundred wives and/or concubines.
Moe Berg and Allen Ginsberg were distant cousins.
Toby Greene. Who jumped ship with Melville in the South Pacific and later reappeared — as a housepainter in Buffalo — to verify events in Typee.
These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.
Being Dwight D. Eisenhower — edifying someone re Southerners opposed to desegregation.
William Faulkner voted for Adlai Stevenson.
An obolus. Six of same having equaled one ancient drachma.
Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess with Boris Godunov.
Dante tires one quickly; it is like looking at the sun.
Said Joyce.
Lavinia.
One of Melville’s grandfathers took part in the Boston Tea Party.
As did one of Edith Wharton’s great-grandfathers.
An uncle of Kafka’s was the director general of the Spanish railway system.
Henry, why are you here?
Waldo, why are you not here?
A pack of lies, Carlyle dismissed poetry as.
Stone dolls, Isaac Newton called sculpture.
You cannot trust the ones who are too careful. As writers or drinkers. Old Goethe cannot have been so good a man as Keats or Chatterton or Rimbaud. The ones that burn.
Said Lowry.
Mark Twain’s was the first house in Hartford with a telephone.
Norway’s king attended Kirsten Flagstad’s funeral.
Do certain people actually remember learning to read?
Monte Carlo, Lillie Langtry died in.
Louis MacNeice died of pneumonia after descending into a mine to check on sound effects while producing a program for the BBC.
Glee-wood, the harp was called in Anglo-Saxon.
Harry Haller, in Steppenwolf—in a setting based on Zurich, ca. 1920—speaks of three mail deliveries each day.
Leopold Bloom, in the Ulysses set a decade and a half earlier, notes the nine o’clock evening postman meaning the last delivery of what in Dublin at that time would have been five.