Search Results

“... different kind of sodium salt. In the 19th century, when archaeologists began excavating Egyptian tombs and shipping out their contents, mummies were taxed as salted fish before the authorities allowed them to enter Cairo. The ancient Egyptians knew their salt. Haunted by the threat of famine on their marginal Nile lands, they were prepared to ...”

“... in these few (I’m sure) inferior artefacts than in a morning spent traipsing round the tombs. It’s partly because we have time to kill and here is just one room and nothing else, no other objects queuing up for attention, no visions of rooms unvisited, treasures overlooked (Madame de Sévigné on sightseeing: ‘What I see tires me and what I ...”

“... in the painting and furniture that has ‘unfortunately been preserved all too well in the tombs of the pharaohs’, to the pyramids themselves which, though individually possessed of ‘size, dignity and durability’, were nevertheless ‘a trifle monotonous’. The point is made with a drawing of a very large pyramid beside a very small palm tree ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... reredos minus its statues. Struck, though, as then by the marble hulks on top of the Neville tombs, which, as R. says, are more representative of dead and butchered bodies than their intact representations can ever have been. Previously these tombs, mutilated and covered in ancient graffiti, were said to have been ...”

“... of ancient religions despite the best efforts of the best scholars to discover some kind of order. Robert Parker in Polytheism and Society at Athens, his synthetic study of gods and cults in one small but document-rich area, compares the ever-increasing pantheon to an overflowing clothes-drawer, ‘which no one felt obliged to tidy’. Nevertheless, he wants ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... Inside the angels were blowing the last trumpet above the chancel arch, the dead rising from their tombs in their shrouds; on the left St Peter welcomed the saved into what seemed a rather overcrowded heavenly city; on the right crowned and mitred souls were being dragged in chains to the mouth of hell. On the south wall the archangel Gabriel was weighing a ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to ...”

“... nationalism; the key works of literature establish the best style in the language; inscriptions on tombs are drawn from literature, and so on. But there is in literature an equal but opposite tendency towards investigation, muckraking, revelation, towards speaking for the disenfranchised and for the silent. This scandalous, politically combative aspect of ...”

“... laid to rest. This was the great insight of another of Durkheim’s students, Robert Hertz: the funeral is a ritual not so much of transition as of separation – ending the earthly existence of the corpse. Proper burial and a proper naming of the dead allows them to go in peace, to be forgotten in Nietzsche’s sense that memory depends ...”

“... travellers carried it with them as a vade mecum or guidebook. Coryate met the adventurer Sir Robert Shirley in the hinterlands of Persia, and was chuffed when he took ‘both my bookes neatly kept’ from his luggage. In the autumn of 1612 Coryate left England, for what would prove to be the last time, en route for the East. Sometime before leaving he ...”

“... I visited the US Army Armor Center in Fort Knox, the colonel in charge of training recommended Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as ‘pinsharp’ on ‘the ethics and morality’ of the future soldiery) and step into plastic cabinets made by Jacuzzi to simulate warfare as it might be fought by ‘the Army after Next’. Meanwhile, the software ...”

“... sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a black hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’. The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with ...”