Lachrymatics
Ferdinand Mount: British Weeping, 17 December 2015
Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015,978 0 19 967605 7 Show More
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015,
“... epitaph on William the Silent: ‘When he cried, the little children died in the streets.’ Edmund Burke was accused by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine of putting it on in his lament for Marie Antoinette, but Burke protested that he had wept as he wrote and that the tears had ‘wetted my paper’. In any case, Wollstonecraft herself had been moved to ... ”