Search Results

“... was Moses able to decipher the letters? Did writing exist beforehand? In the early 18th century, Daniel Defoe argued with faultless logic that the answer was no, since all kinds of things would then have been written down that hadn’t been. Venus, for instance, would have been exposed as an ‘everlasting Whore, an insatiate impudent Strumpet’. This ...”

“... novel, like Amis’s Blinkie Heaven and Teach Him a Lesson. Borrow’s favourite writer was Daniel Defoe, of whom also it may be asked: ‘Is this man writing fiction or just telling lies?’ Michael Collie has found a manuscript fragment in which Borrow wonders how Defoe managed to get his facts right in ...”

“... learned that ‘many a Newgate Bird becomes a great Man.’ But as Ekirch carefully documents, Daniel Defoe and many subsequent historians have greatly exaggerated the possibilities for upward mobility. Most former convicts ended their days as marginal farmers, desperate men and women driven to drink and occasionally to suicide by the hardship that ...”

“... me) in de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match, and it originates in the Journal of the Plague Year of Daniel Defoe. The Stretch Jackson tournament pits a handful of rather colourless professional gamblers against Abell’s more fully-rounded characters, amateurs or semi-amateurs who practise some outrageous forms of psychological gamesmanship. Who should we ...”

“... of conflict and competition. In the 18th century, as Britain became a colonial and maritime power, Daniel Defoe wrote that ‘the Phoenicians were the Englishmen of that Age.’ He even suggested that, like the British, they had colonised America. Irish claims to Phoenicianism persisted into the early part of the 20th century. Among the best-known ...”

“... Hospital records burning in builders’ skips. Chalk quarries, once worked by a company in which Daniel Defoe had an interest, converted to retail parks (Thurrock, Lakeside). If we want to remember what is ahead of us, to stumble backwards into the future, we’d better start reading the prophecies of 19th-century science fiction as hot ...”

“... An earlier novelist whom Fowles does certainly admire and perhaps emulate is the danger-courting Daniel Defoe, deceitful but ‘sounding true’. Then, if we look through the genuine pages of ‘Historical Chronicle, 1736’ reproduced in A Maggot, we find that the running story is about Major Porteous who fired into an Edinburgh mob during the year and ...”

“... simply as the inhabitants of a particular country, not as a nation, but as a race. The vision of Daniel Defoe pauses at one point to paraphrase Sir Thomas Browne, though it takes great freedom with his meaning: ‘When the bones of King Arthur were digged up, the race beheld some original of themselves; so can we erect and proclaim our birth upon the ...”

“... the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time simultaneously. He passes through them like a ghost through walls, and drifts across intellectual frontiers.Robb is the author of ...”

“... remarks; ‘it is much rarer to find men writing as women.’ Two distinguished exceptions were Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, who took shelter behind their female protagonists. The Brontës are an obvious example of female writers posing as male, or at least behind the carefully androgynous pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; though in a ...”

“... as a popular variation on what would come to be the essential themes of Enlightenment thought. Daniel Defoe compared the pirate settlers of Madagascar to the founders of Rome, and Montesquieu claimed that the Greeks, too, were originally pirates; Graeber suggests that tales of pirate politics would have been well known to many writers and thinkers of ...”

“... or green cotton cassock, a cap or such-like, and will take incredible pains for such a trifle’. Daniel Defoe agreed that other nations might be taught ‘clothing with decency, not shameless and naked; feeding with humanity, and not in a manner brutal; dwelling in towns and cities, with economy and government, and not like savages’. But these changes ...”

“... odd plank. Finders paid their fee to the lord and kept the wood for building, mending or burning. Daniel Defoe wrote that on the North Norfolk coast there was ‘scarce a barn or a shed, or a stable, nay, not the pales of their yards and gardens, not a necessary house, but what was built of old planks, beams, wales and timbers, etc, the wrecks of ships ...”

“... cases, the bank’s security remained strong enough to satisfy even such an acerbic critic as Daniel Defoe, who wrote that ‘no accounts in the world are more exactly kept, no place in the world has so much business done with so much ease.’ Murphy points out that the bank’s credibility was earned by its daily performance, ‘in the provision of ...”

“... it is impossible for us now to re-create the alarming or exhilarating effect of a few pages of Daniel Defoe on an 18th-century reader reared on a literary diet of epic, pastoral and elegy. The idea that everyday life is dramatically enthralling, that it is fascinating simply in its boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary ...”