Daniel Wright > Recent Status Updates

There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead hus own cause in his own court, within his own heart, - and always to plead it successfully.

Practically every Jane Austen heroine plays the piano... (If her lover or husband was musical, he probably played a melody instrument such as the flute or violin - with the consequence that when they played sonatas together she accompanied him, taking her lead from him, just as she was expected to do in other walks of life.)

Jonathan Del Mar's recent edition of [Beethoven's] Ninth Symphony amply illustrates the embarrassing fact that some of the most imaginative and original moments in the canon have been the result of printers' errors.

The role in music history played by the letter 'B' has never been satisfactorily explained.

In many periods the historian of literature discovers a dominant literary form... it must be noticed that such dominance is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.

But it is just that which most torments me, for in all the adversities of fortune, the most unhappy kind of misfortune is to have known happiness.

Whatever claims reverence risks ridicule. As long as there is any religion we shall laugh at parsons; and if we still (though much less frequently than our grandfathers) make fun of women, that is because the last traces of Frauendienst are not yet wholly lost.

[Augustine] comments on the fact - to him, apparently, remarkable - that Ambrose, when reading to himself, read silently. You could see his eyes moving, but you could hear nothing. In such a passage one has the solemn privilege of being present at the birth of a new world. Behind us is that almost unimaginable period, so relentlessly objective that in it even 'reading' (in our sense) did not yet exist [cont[

As regards curses, the law describes corporate punishments, which we happen to find convenient (and memorizable) to group under ten headings that begin with the letter d: death, disease, drought, dearth, danger, destruction, defeat, deportation, destitution, and disgrace.

These phantom periods for which the historian searches in vain - the Rome and Greece that the middle ages believed in, the British past of Malory and Spenser, the Middle Age itself as it was conceived by the romantic revival - all these have their place in a history more momentous than that which commonly bears the name.

Asked in January 1917 by Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, how he proposed to regain his subjects' confidence, [Tsar] Nicholas retorted: 'Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain mine?'