Virgil was five years older than Horace.
Wondering when and where the last casual streetcorner conversation in Latin might have taken place.
Norma loquendi.
The rumor that Frieda Lawrence’s lover after Lawrence’s death, whom she asked to transport Lawrence’s ashes from France to New Mexico, indifferently dumped them — and substituted no one knows what before the Taos reburial.
Mouse-poor, Robert Graves describes John Clare as having been.
Drunk as a mouse.
Chaucer somewhere writes.
A sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.
General George S. Patton compassionately described Jewish concentration-camp survivors as.
Picasso. Cézanne. Matisse. Braque. Bonnard. Renoir.
All of whom painted portraits of Ambroise Vollard.
Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï. Man Ray. Lee Miller. Robert
Doisneau. Robert Capa. David Douglas Duncan. Cecil Beaton.
All of whom photographed Picasso.
George Washington’s will called for the freeing of his slaves.
As had Aristotle’s for the freeing of most of his — 2,100 years earlier.
More’s Utopia, in which women are granted full and equal rights to education with men — dated 1516.
Pulmonary fibrosis, Marlon Brando died of.
Don’t keep talking to me about nature, said Corot. All I see out there are Corots.
A 1940 letter from Béla Bartók, new in New York, about attempting to go by subway from Forest Hills, in Queens, to lower Manhattan —
And spending three mystified hours underground before sneaking shamefacedly home — his words — without ever achieving his destination.
Turner’s eternal stovepipe hat.
Eliot’s bowler.
Saul Bellow’s fedora.
A precious, priestly, hothouse darling.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch dismissed Hopkins as.
Revolting, the London Times called Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents.
The occasion, soon after Vladimir Horowitz became Toscanini’s son-in-law, on which Toscanini leaned from the podium and patted him on the head at the end of a performance.
Green eyes, the self-portraits indicate van Gogh had.
It has been possible for a long time to conceive of a poet who has never written a poem.
Leslie Fiedler once said.
Debussy never learned which side won World War I.
Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.
Anthony Trollope was once told by an acquaintance that one of his recurring serialized characters had become boring.
Trollope killed her off in the next installment.
The misfortunate, otherwise unknown first-century BC Roman Egnatius — remembered because of a poem in which Catullus accuses him of cleaning his teeth with urine.
The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world — is that he does not exist.
Stendhal said.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s addiction to morphine.
And/or ether.
Is there one major Dostoievsky novel in which no one commits suicide?
Dostoievsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss.
Einstein said.
Former Naval Person —
Winston Churchill’s code name having been in World War II.
Colonel Berger —
Malraux’s, in the Resistance.
Kipling, who was forty-two, remains the youngest author to win the Nobel Prize.
Camus was forty-four.
July 17, 1967, John Coltrane died on.
Aspen, Colorado, Mina Loy died in.
Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, kept a twenty-year diary that was evidently devoted almost entirely to the evisceration of his character.
Hardy burned every word of it at her death.
A second wife, Florence, once accused him of not having spoken to anyone outside of their house in twelve days. Hardy insisted he had.
He had said good morning to the manure-cart driver.
O body, mass of corruptions, what have I to do with thee?
Asked Augustine.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Said Aldous Huxley.
Benoit Mandelbrot.
Benoit de Sainte-Maure.
Émile Zola’s certainty that after a hundred years Les Fleurs du Mal would be no more than a footnoted curiosity in literary history.
Maugham’s — that there was nothing to be found in Mallarmé but pretense and platitudes.
The identity of the Immortal Beloved.
Keep hold of my arm, they must make room for us, not we for them.
Shortly after its publication, Robert McAlmon informed Joyce that he planned to throw his copy of Ulysses out the window. Joyce told him not to:
Socrates might be passing in the street.
E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.
Said Katherine Mansfield.
The early Shakespearean Betterton, distressed over foreign intrusions onto the late seventeenth-century London stage:
By squeaking Italians and capering monsieurs, end quote.
Shakespeare’s birthday, Turner was born on.
More greatness in this man than in any other born in our times. Vasari saw in Donatello.
What needs to be said is best said twice.
Said Empedocles.
At one point near the end of the Reign of Terror, more than 1,300 guillotined prisoners were flung into the same single Paris mass grave — one of the 1,300 having been André Chénier.
Continued speculation that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual.
Bologna, Lodovico Carracci died in.
Parma, Agostino.
Rome, Annibale.
Theodore Dreiser’s general preference for the word kike, rather than Jew.
If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.
Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.
Fish feel pain.
A seminonfictional semifiction.
And with its interspersed unattributed quotations at roughest count adding up to a hundred or more.
Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.
Is Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak the oldest tale from English history that children still remember?
Or King Alfred and the cakes?
’Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul.
Said Pope, re writing well.