William > Recent Status Updates

"Si la fluidification des comportements requise par une économie développée était incompatible avec un catalogue normatif de conduites restreintes, elle s'accommodait par contre parfaitement d'une exaltation permanente de la volonté et du moi."

Houellebecq making the profound point that so many still fail to grasp: social liberalism is the natural corollary of economic liberalism: the 2 are not in opposition.

The Egyptians were not generalisers, 'which constitutes their most fundamental distinction from natural generalisers like the Greeks, who couldn't rub two facts together without coming up with a hot universal theory.'

Most Radnorshire farmers knew chapter and verse of the Bible, preferring the Old Testament to the knew, because in the Old Testament there were many more stories about sheep-farming.

Apparently it is easier to impose upon a crowd than upon an individual, for Aristagoras, who had failed to impose upon Cleomenes, succeeded with thirty thousand Athenians.

To choose which should be king, they proposed to mount their horses on the outskirts of the city, and he whose horse neighed first after the sun was up should have the throne.

Now to reckon three generations as a hundred years, three hundred generations make ten thousand years, and the remaining forty-one generations make 1340 years more; thus one gets a total of 11, 340 years, during the whole of which time, they [the Egyptians] say, no god ever assumed mortal form.

An acceptably philological way of putting it might be to say that Tolkien was the Chrétien de Troyes of the 20th century. Chrétien, in the 12th century, did not invent the Arthurian romance, which must have existed in some form before his time, but he showed what could be done with it...in the same way, Tolkien did not invent heroic fantasy, but he showed what could be done with it.

"The same front now glanced with many lights, some throwing far forward into the night a fixed and stationary blaze, and others hurrying from one window to another, intimating the bustle and busy preparation preceding their arrival, which had been intimated by an avant-courier."

Scott's prose occasionally gives me intimations of slap-dashery.

Discussing the influence of Scandinavian names and place-names in Normandy, Roesdahl reveals that Auberville derives from the Norwegian/Danish Ásbjörn, suffixed by the French 'ville'. Which means poor old Tess of the d'Urbervilles is really the heroic shield-maiden 'Tess af Ásbjörn'!!

The coffins of upper class women in tenth-century Denmark often contained the body of a wagon...Food and drink were usually placed in the graves. All of this indicates that the realm of the dead was reached by a journey. An element of the burial custom which today seems particularly macabre was the possibility of being buried with a companion, presumably usually a slave, killed for the burial.

In the pagan period unwanted children could be exposed to the elements and left to their fate, but Christians reacted strongly against this practice, and it was eventually banned, except in the case of deformed children.

A Spanish Arab who visited Hedeby in the tenth century recorded that both men and women used artificially produced eye make-up, and the English chronicler John of Wallingford, who, although he lived after the Viking Age, had access to older sources, relates that the Vikings' success with women was due to their having a bath on Saturdays, combing their hair and being handsomely dressed.

The seductions of a concubine, the perfumes of a pie: both, as a matter of the utmost urgency, had to be kept at bay.

The seductions of a concubine, the perfumes of a pie: both, as a matter of the utmost urgency, had to be kept at bay.

Most ingenious of all, perhaps, were the Scots, who bragged, with a formidable disregard for plausibility, that they were originally from Egypt, descendants of the same Pharaoh's daughter who had discovered Moses in the bulrushes - and whose name, so they cheerfully insisted, in a manner designed to clinch their argument, had been Princess Scota.

Olaf Trygvasson was a Norwegian, a man of the 'North Way', a realm so far distant from all that made for Christian order that even its women, it was said, grew beards, 'and sorcerers and enchanters and other satellites of Antrichrist' swarmed everywhere.

Nothing, indeed, in the fractured Europe of the time, was more authentically multicultural than the business of enslaving Slavs.

By the terms of a treaty signed that year, Henry had agreed to hand over a chunk of the province of Swabia - what is now Switzerland and Alsace - in exchange for a treasure 'infinitely precious': a spear of terrible power. No one doubted that it was the Saxon king who had secured the bargain by this arrangement.

Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.

"He applied to the earl of Oxford for some public employment. Oxford enjoined him to study Spanish; and when, some time afterwards, he came again, and said that he had mastered it, dismissed him with his congratulations, 'Then, Sir, I envy you the pleasure of reading Don Quixote in the original.'"

'Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, creaking and incongruous, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronised, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.'

Mills & Boon lost a rare talent in Mr. Powell.

'Come back with me to my flat,' said Atwater, 'and have a drink there.'
'Why?'
'We might talk.'
'What about?'
'Well, inspiration and so on.'
'Can't we talk here?'
'It's very noisy, isn't it?'
'i suppose it is.'
Atwater said: 'I've got some rather interesting first editions. I should like to show them to you.'

'Would the remark about to fall from those beautiful and melancholy lips, as the young man's eyes fixed themselves upon that infinity of sea convey to me some omen, some clue, some augury of what awaited me over there?
"Cats," he began. "Cats, Mr Powys," he repeated - and the curious thing was that nothing had led up to this announcement - "are afraid of dogs. They are!"'

"If it is God the Father,' said the miscreant, 'who has allowed the King to behave so disloyally towards me, I'll pull God the Father's nose!' 'This proposition,' said the official report, 'is blasphemous, scandalous, offensive to pious ears, and savouring of the heresy of the Vaudois, who affirmed that God was corporeal and had human members. Nor is it an excuse to say that Christ, being made a man, had a nose.'