Another What-If

A quick note to say I finished the two books by John Maddox Roberts, Hannibal's Children and The Seven Hills.

A Byzantine Discovering the Letter Press

From Harry Turtledove's Agent of Byzantium:

"And–oh, think of it! We could make endless copies of the same standard forms and send them throughout the Empire. And it might not even be too much labor to have other forms, on which we could keep track of whether the first ones had been properly dispatched." (p.144)

Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Since I returned The Spy Who Came In From the Cold to the library before copying any passage, I'll copy this from Le Carré's bio on his website:

I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. I write and walk and swim and drink.

Required Reading for the Arab Revolutions

I have been saying for over a year to students, friends, and colleagues that we should be reading Book 2 of Thucydides very carefully as we watch the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. I will now add that we should all read von Gentz' The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution. Liberty Fund has reissued John Quincy Adams' translation of the German.

Adams also had a mastery of Greek and Latin and I wonder if he channeled this into his sententiae in his translation, or if these reflected the literary tastes of his age. Here is one such (of the taxes imposed on the colonies by Parliament): "their secret object could scarcely be any other, than to wrest by artifice, what was not ventured to be maintained by force." (p.22)

Let this serve as a word of warning to current enterprises:

a revolution, which has no other principle than to attack the existing constitution, must necessarily proceed to the last extremities of imagination and of criminal guilt. (p.79)

The New Jersey Reader

Unfortunately, it looks like A New Jersey Reader is now out of print. The Rutgers press assembled this in 1961 and it includes fiction, history, natural history, sports, ghost tales, sea tales, tall tales, etc. of New Jersey and by New Jerseyans. These include:

John Brooks The Meadows
Andrew D. Mellick, Jr. The Old Stone House
J.C. Furnas The Case of the Gullible Bootleggers
Henry Charlton Beck Roundabout Islands
George Weller The Jackson Whites
Karl Baarslag Two Jersey Shore Wrecks
Daniel G. Hoffman Stephen Crane's New Jersey Ghosts
Fletcher Pratt James Lawrence
Alexander Woollcott Aunt Mary's Doctor
Edward Weeks Bay Head in the Summer
John C. Van Dyke A Child's Impressions of Lincoln
Arthur B. Price Artie's Newark
Owen Johnson The Great Pancake Record
Marguerite F. Bayliss The Colfax Fox
Broadus Mitchell The Duel of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton
Frank R. Stockton The Story of Tempe Wick
Earl Schenck Miers Here's One for the Records


As the book is out of print, I thought it useful to assemble the authors and their selections. I shall have to investigate many of these authors whom I must admit were unknown to me.

Palin's Python Diaires

From Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years:

...that's where a daily diary differs from autobiography or memoir. It is an antidote to hindsight. (p.xxi)

We could lose the repetitious "daily" (diary < Lat. diarium < dies), but an excellent point nonetheless.

Miss Brodie the Classicist

From The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

"It is obvious," said Miss Brodie, "that these girls are not of cultured homes and heritage. The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd." (p.51)

And

Miss Brodie had already prompted them as follows: "I am not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely." So that the girls were left in no doubt to Miss Brodie's contempt for the Modern side.

Later she has the girls report back to her about their Greek studies in an attempt to learn the language later in life.


Not that Miss Brodie is an exemplary model of the Classical teacher. And there are signs of this in the lifeless way she repeats the etymology of "education", etc.