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“Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York, Scribners, 1932), p. 101, suggests that men of this stamp, being disinclined to calculate too closely, have their own disease: “Syphilis was the disease of the crusaders in the middle ages. It was supposed to be brought to Europe by them, and it is a disease of all people who lead lives in which disregard of con-sequences dominates. It is an industrial accident, to be expected by all those who lead irregular sexual lives and from their habits of mind would rather take chances than use prophylactics, and it is a to-be-expected end, or rather phase, of the life of all fornicators who continue their careers far enough.” Penicillin has undermined this route to manliness.”
― Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior
― Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior
“fifteen-year-old from Shepherd’s Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a ‘good hiding’, the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading ‘I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work’, but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of ‘literary offal’.”
― The Wicked Boy
― The Wicked Boy
“In June it took part in an elaborately planned action at Messines Ridge, in Belgian Flanders, which opened with the Allies detonating a million pounds of explosives next to the German trenches, instantly killing 10,000 enemy soldiers. The blast was heard in London and felt across southern England. In the fighting that ensued, Bill Alabaster led the parties carrying grenades, ammunition and water from the 45th Battalion headquarters to the troops at the front line, across open ground raked by artillery and machine-gun fire. Herring recommended him for the Military Medal. The 45th lost seven officers and 344 other ranks over four days of combat.”
― The Wicked Boy
― The Wicked Boy
“Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels’. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had ‘an unhinging and mesmeric effect’ upon his mind.”
― The Wicked Boy
― The Wicked Boy
“But racism is most outrageously to the fore in ‘Ashraf and Anjab’, in which the sadistically villainous Anjab is described by Harun al-Rashid as follows: ‘This man is black as a negro … with red eyes, a nose like a clay pot and lips like kidneys’, and his mother is no better looking for she ‘was black as pitch with a snub nose, red eyes and an unpleasant smell’. In ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ the monk Simeon predicts that the shrine of the Ka’ba will be destroyed by drunken and singing blacks. As Bernard Lewis’s Race and Slavery in the Middle East put it when discussing the role of blacks in The Thousand and One Nights, it ‘reveals a familiar pattern of sexual fantasy, social and occupational discrimination, and an unthinking identification of lighter with better and darker with worse’.9”
― Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
― Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
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Sara’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Sara’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
788 books
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93 friends
25 books
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11 friends
2,150 books
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108 friends
3,273 books
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274 friends
3,593 books
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51 friends
505 books
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55 friends
51 books
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22 friends
1,249 books
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91 friends
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