January 2012
12 posts
Traumatised by Lear, Johnson couldn’t reread the last scenes until he was compelled to edit them. According to Hazlitt, he approved the imposition on it of a happy ending which was the calculated practice of the contemporary stage. Tolstoy forgot himself in animosity towards the play and tried to wreck its reputation, because—according to Orwell—it presented too precise an account of his own...
“Indeed it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human life, the...”
– Hazlitt (last one I promise)
“The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to...”
– Hazlitt
“Religiosity seems to ooze out of the flagstones here: ministers and police...”
– Laurie Penny (Cf James Butler)
“The most interesting part of seeing these guys up close is seeing the way people...”
– Taibbi
“The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with...”
– David Bromwich
“It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence,...”
– Hazlitt on the fear of death
“Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if...”
– Hazlitt on hating
“For the habit of his mind would lead him to find out a reason for or against any...”
– Hazlitt on Burke
“These tactics constitute a ‘total war on criminals’, though what this means, in...”
– James Butler
A wasting shadow
Think about this from Ross Douthat:
When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’ — that ‘death is no different whined at than withstood.’
(Previously in Douthat.) There is a grade of...
“But for us to pretend that we are not stressing the ecosystem on a multitude of...”
– Tom Murphy 