British Literature Quotes

Dr. Watson's summary list of Sherlock Holmes's strengths and weaknesses: "1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil. 2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil. 3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil. 4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble. 5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening. 6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them. 7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound. 8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic. 9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. 10. Plays the violin well. 11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman. 12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.

London on a gloomy and rainy day is still better than Paris on a bright and sunny day.

For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?

What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?

Manglish is the Malaysian form of English. It’s superior to Singlish when you’re in Malaysia and inferior when you’re in Singapore. It’s known for its love for Malay, Cantonese, Tamil, Mandarin, and Hokkien. Occasionally, there are English terms, too. It’s different from Indian English, which is spoken with a punchy tone, or British English, which is an endangered language in London. A key distinction between Manglish and Singlish is Manglish’s recognition of Tamil words. Singlish denies the existence of inferior Tamil words.

I have no heart? Perhaps I have not; / But then you're mad to take offense / That I don't give you what I have not got; / Use your own common sense.

Now we are free to come and go as we please, not in sorrow but in laughter.

Sıradan insan uygarlığın lanetidir.

Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around

Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other.

Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.

Love is in prospect or retrospect, the present is ecstasy.

For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.

My flesh and blood...when it rises against me, is not my flesh and blood. I discard it.

When I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it, though it be to the prejudice of my name and to the detriment of my reader’s immediate pleasure as well as my own.

Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it, For that your self ye daily such doe see: But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit, And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me. For all the rest, how ever fayre it be, Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew: But onely that is permanent and free From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew. That is true beautie: that doth argue you To be divine and borne of heavenly seed: Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit, from whom al true And perfect beauty did at first proceed. He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made, All other fayre lyke flowres untymely fade.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she liked to read. The university’s “British and American Literature Course Catalog” was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like “English 274: Lily’s Euphues” excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. “English 450A: Hawthorne and James” filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer in Danceteria. Even as a girl in their house in Prettrybrook, Madeleine wandered into the library, with its shelves of books rising higher than she could reach … and the magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.

I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.

Mrs. Charteris used to say that if we spent our spare time growing flowers instead of talking a lot of nonsense, the world would be a happier place...

Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?' 'It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.

How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided

My wisdom is for my friends, my folly for myself.

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation—if one may be blunt—is for latecomers.

A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?

Can you read?" the boy said at last. "Of course," said Arrietty. "Can't you?" "No," he stammered. "I mean--yes. I mean I've just come from India." "What's that got to do with it?" asked Arrietty. "Well, if you're born in India, you're bilingual. And if you're bilingual, you can't read. Not so well." Arrietty stared up at him: what a monster, she thought, dark against the sky. "Do you grow out of it?" she asked. He moved a little and she felt the cold flick of his shadow. "Oh yes," head said, "it wears off. My sisters were bilingual; now they aren't a bit. They could read any of those books upstairs in the schoolroom." "So could I," said Arrietty quickly, "if someone could hold them, and turn the pages. I'm not a bit bilingual. I can read anything.

you’ve clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women’s studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above.

One of the effects of indoctrination, of passing into the anglo-centrism of British West Indian culture, is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King's English and in the proper forms of expression. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, or worse. And folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers--some, not all--and you will see what I mean. The reader has to dissect anglican stanza after anglican stanza for Caribbean truth, and may never find it. The anglican ideal -- Milton, Wordsworth, Keats -- was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be able, to achieve such excellence. We crouched outside the cave.

It was William who would climb out of his carriage unafraid and help a farmer drive a herd of cattle or sheep across a road when necessary.

The ritual was kissing her at various parts as if I were adorning her.

I was over forty years old and I felt like I hadn’t been born yet. I had spent my whole life studying and reading literature, dissecting and analysing the emotions of others while feeling nothing myself. I was vulnerable, ripe, hanging low and alone, yearning with all my being to be picked for something special. I had lived my life in a steady, British drizzle. I wanted tornadoes, hurricanes, whirlwinds and earthquakes. I wanted disasters and triumphs, highs and lows, peaks and troughs; I wanted every extreme of every feeling I’d never known.

The result of the British war is a source of anxiety. For it is ascertained that the approaches to the island are protected by astonishing masses of cliff. Moreover, it is now known that there isn't a pennyweight of silver in that island, nor any hope of booty except from slaves, among whom I don't[Pg 283] suppose you can expect any instructed in literature or music.

Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn't want known outside their own coterie.

Il suo gusto per i libri era stato precoce. Da bambino, a volte un paggio lo trovava, a mezzanotte, ancora intento a leggere. [...] Per dirla in breve, Orlando era un nobile malato d'amore per la letteratura.

It was not until 1948 that Cambridge University stopped requiring a knowledge of classical (ancient) Greek as a prerequisite for admission. This requirement was based not only on the intrinsic merits of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Knowledge of Greek was a screening device to keep out the less affluent, who attended British state schools, where Greek was less likely to be taught than in private schools.

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required the projection of 'English Literature' as one of the defining elements of cultural superiority that justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.

Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so that revolution would not damage its own hardwon security and growing prosperity. Eighteenth-century writing is full of pride in England as the land of liberty (far ahead of France, the great rival, in political maturity), and saw a corresponding growth in national self-confidence accompanying the expansion of empire.

And even these ((the common hill fairy, the standard elf of folk-lore) are in danger of being banished into the limbo of forgetfulness by the quite artificial fairy of juvenile literary commerce, with gauzy wing and skirts reminiscent of the ballet. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that literature has been able to create wings where none were before, for our native fairies are as wingless as ourselves. But for such an innovation the Elizabethan poets and playwrights were probably responsible - a topic which we must consider in another chapter.

...who of English birth can take liberties with the language? To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow.

He maintained that there was some kind of magic about English schooling and that the education it provided had caused the inhabitants of a small island to become a great nation and a great Empire and to produce the world’s greatest literature. ‘No child of mine’, he kept saying, ‘is going to school anywhere else but in England.

I think one must engage in politics – using the word in a wide sense – and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one’s own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

The waves of refugees who washed into London, escaping from Hitler, and then from Stalin, were bone-poor, often threadbare, and lived as they could on a translation here, a book review, language lessons. They worked as hospital porters, on building sites, did housework. There were a few cafés and restaurants as poor as they were, catering for their nostalgic need to sit and drink coffee and talk politics and literature. They were from universities all over Europe, and were intellectuals, a word guaranteed to incite waves of suspicion in the breasts of the xenophobic philistine British, who did not necessarily think it a commendation when they admitted that these newcomers were so much better educated than they were.

Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountains, where he has been charged to slay the Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world.

Victoire shouldered the task. ‘I wonder,’ she said, very slowly, ‘if you’ve ever read any of the abolition literature published before Parliament finally outlawed slavery.’ Letty frowned. ‘I don’t see how . . .’ ‘The Quakers presented the first antislavery petition to Parliament in 1783,’ said Victoire. ‘Equiano published his memoir in 1789. Add that to the countless slave stories the abolitionists were telling the British public – stories of the cruellest, most awful tortures you can inflict on a fellow human. Because the mere fact that Black people were denied their freedom was not enough. They needed to see how grotesque it was. And even then, it took them decades to finally outlaw the trade. And that’s slavery. Compared to that, a war in Canton over trade rights is going to look like nothing. It’s not romantic. There are no novelists penning sagas about the effects of opium addiction on Chinese families. If Parliament votes to force Canton’s ports open, it’s going to look like free trade working as it should. So don’t tell me that the British public, if they knew, would do anything at all.

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime (Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress) While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal, more private. Indeed, it was often published for only a limited circle of readers. This was true of Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen, and even more so for the Metaphysical poets, whose works were published mostly after their deaths. John Donne and George Herbert are the most significant of these poets. The term 'Metaphysical' was used to describe their work by the eighteenth-century critic, Samuel Johnson. He intended the adjective to be pejorative. He attacked the poets' lack of feeling, their learning, and the surprising range of images and comparisons they used. Donne and Herbert were certainly very innovative poets, but the term 'Metaphysical' is only a label, which is now used to describe the modern impact of their writing. After three centuries of neglect and disdain, the Metaphysical poets have come to be very highly regarded and have been influential in recent British poetry and criticism. They used contemporary scientific discoveries and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith, and eternity, colloquial speech-based rhythms, and innovative verse forms, to examine the relationship between the individual, his God, and the universe. Their 'conceits', metaphors and images, paradoxes and intellectual complexity make the poems a constant challenge to the reader.

Practically all human literature deals with the present and the past; when literature tries to describe the future, it at once ceases to be human and ceases to be literature; and all the pictures which the Bolsheviks have so far given us of a future world constructed on the design of Lenin are so depressing that nobody would like to read about such a world, much less to live in it.

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man - motivated by self-interest - is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a strong controlling state, 'an artificial man', to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics.

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache.

And what do we do to fit our English-speaking Chinese, our docile and happy, our truly loyal servants, for the Asia of the future? We teach them English history: Henry the VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria, English geography, three-quarters of the book the British Isles, one quarter the rest of the world. literature, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and The Mill on the Floss, all in Basic, as they aren't to know the complexities of our tongue. We cut them from their own learning, their traditions; if that were cutting them off merely from the past, it wouldn't matter, but also and more dangerously, it cuts them from the present, and perhaps the future of Asia. With these happy eunuchs who are bound to us by their knowledge of English we run this country well as our colonial preserve. But we cannot pretend to think we can leave it to them to run it for themselves. All the revolutionaries in India were people who went back to their own literature and language. We'll see the same phenomenon here.

Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.

We need hard science to establish the rate and scale of these declines, to work out why it is occurring and what mitigation strategies can be brought into play. But we need literature, too; we need to communicate what the losses mean. I think of the wood warbler, a small citrus-coloured bird fast disappearing from British forests. It is one thing to show the statistical facts about this species’ decline. It is another thing to communicate to people what wood warblers are, and what that loss means, when your experience of a wood that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers have gone.

Sherlock Holmes—his limits. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil. Philosophy.—Nil. Astronomy.—Nil. Politics.—Feeble. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening. Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them. Chemistry.—Profound. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. Plays the violin well. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy—this discovery is not a matter for triumph... And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds. But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not... Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves. All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense.

What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question easily and that there is no problem here. I believe our tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe we have a right to this tradition, greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have. I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the pre-eminence of Jews in Western culture. He asks if this pre-eminence allows us to conjecture about the innate superiority of the Jews, and answers in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in Western culture because they act within that culture and, at the same time, do not feel tied to it by any special devotion; 'for that reason,' he says, 'a Jew will always find it easier than a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture'; and we can say the same of the Irish in English culture. In the case of the Irish, we have no reason to suppose that the profusion of Irish names in British literature and philosophy is due to any racial pre-eminence, for many of those illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, were people who had no Celtic blood; however, it was sufficient for them to feel Irish, to feel different, in order to be innovators in English culture. I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.

Why were the Jews so restless? It was not because they were a difficult, warlike, tribal and essentially backward society, like the Parthians, who gave the Romans constant trouble on the eastern fringe, rather as the Pathans and Afghans worried the British on the North-West Frontier of India. On the contrary: the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable. The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East. Educated people spoke and thought in Greek, and Greek modes set the standards in art and architecture, drama, music and literature. So the Greeks never had any sense of cultural submission to Rome.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.” “To forget it!” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” “But the Solar System!” I protested. “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well-informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way— SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits. 1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil. 2. Philosophy.—Nil. 3. Astronomy.—Nil. 4. Politics.—Feeble. 5. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening. 6. Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them. 7. Chemistry.—Profound. 8. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic. 9. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century. 10. Plays the violin well. 11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman. 12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

A courtesan would receive years of training in literature, etiquette, dance and music before she was allowed to make her first public appearance. Courtesans have played quite a huge role in enriching our country’s traditions in music and art, you know. And sexuality – that too was considered an art, an ancient art…” What did it mean for the courtesans to have to make themselves available to the colonizer? To lay their bodies open to sex, to medical inspection, to laws? And all this to keep the military virile and marching towards the expansion of Empire! What happened to the women afterwards, that’s what I want to know! In fact, I don’t think it was very different from slavery in America – Black women eroticized, abused, discarded. No, the real story must have been far, far worse. Before the British, after the British.

El blanco habló de otro país más allá del mar donde una mujer poderosa se sentaba en el trono, mientras los hombres y las mujeres bailaban a la sombra de su autoridad y benevolencia. Ella estaba dispuesta a extender su sombra para cubrir a los agikuyu. Se rieron de este hombre excéntrico, cuya piel estaba tan escaldada que el negro de fuera se había pelado. El agua caliente le debía de haber afectado a la cabeza [...] Más tarde, o eso decían, Waiyaki había sido enterrado vivo en Kibwezi con la cabeza apuntando al centro de la tierra, un aviso viviente para quienes, en años venideros, osaran desafiar la autoridad de la mujer cristiana cuya sombra protectora dominaba ahora tierra y mar. Entonces nadie se dio cuenta: pero mirando hacia atrás pudimos ver que la sangre de Waiyaki contenía una semilla, un grano, que dio origen a un movimiento cuya mayor fortaleza, desde ese día, nacía del vínculo con la tierra.

In literature, plays, and cinema, substitutionary sacrifice is always the most riveting and moving plot point. In the movie The Last of the Mohicans, British major Duncan Heyward asks his Indian captors if he might die in the flames so that Cora, whom he loves, and Nathaniel can go free. When, as he is being dragged away, Duncan cries, “My compliments, sir! Take her and get out!” we are electrified by his unflinching willingness to die to save others, one of whom has been his rival. He dies with his arms bound and stretched out, as if he were on a cross. In Ernest Gordon’s memoir of being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, he recounts how at the end of a day of forced labor the guards counted the shovels, and one was apparently missing. A furious guard threatened the British POWs that unless the guilty person confessed, he would kill them all. He cocked his gun to start shooting them one by one. At that moment, one prisoner stepped forward calmly and said, “I did it.” He stood quietly at attention, and “he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53: 7) as he was beaten to death. When they all got back to the camp and counted the shovels again, it turned out that they were all there. The man had sacrificed himself to save them all. In the first Harry Potter novel, the evil Lord Voldemort can’t touch Harry without being burned. Later Dumbledore explains it to him. “Your mother died to save you. . . . Love as powerful [as that] . . . leaves its own mark. . . . [T]o have been loved so deeply . . . will give us some protection forever.” Why do these stories move us? It’s because we know from the mundane corners of life to the most dramatic that all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. We know that anybody who has ever done anything that really made a difference in our lives made a sacrifice, stepped in and gave something or paid something or bore something so we would not have to.

I suppose that an American's approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children.... I contend that a child brought up on the nursery rhymes and Jacobs' English Fairy Tales can better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find for himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the "inward eye" with the images in the books he reads when young so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Bronte novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what "wuthering" meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition.

They were brought up that way by their parents. When they came to England, they were further mesmerised. They were impressed by English language, literature and English way of life. They considered the English as divine. Let us consider a specific case. The person is not a modern Hindu but a Muslim. His name is Sayyad Ahmad. He founded the Aligad Movement and asked Muslims to be slaves of the English forever. When he lived in England in late nineteenth century he wrote a letter to his friends describing life in England at that time. In a letter of 1869 he wrote – “The English have reasons to believe that we in India are imbecile brutes. What I have seen and daily seeing is utterly beyond imagination of a native in India. All good things, spiritual and worldly which should be found in man have been bestowed by the Almighty on Europe and especially on the English.” (Ref -Nehru’s Autobiography page 461). Above letter of Sayyad Ahmad would suffice to show how mentally degenerated and devoid of any self-respect, Indians had become. I have already illustrated this point by quoting experiences of Indians from the early days of Dadabhai Naoroji till I reached London in 1906. Gandhi came to London to study Law in 1888. His behaviour was no different to that described above. He too tried to use Top Hat, Tail Coat and expensive ties. Many other Indians have described their experiences in a similar manner. Motilal Nehru, like father of Arvind Ghosh too, was impressed by the British Raj. He sent his son Jawaharlal to England in his young age, who stayed in English hostels and so anglicised he had become that after studying in Cambridge University and becoming a Barrister in 1912 he paid no attention to Indian Politics which was taking shape in Europe. Anyone can verify my statements by referring to autobiographies of Gandhi, Nehru, Charudatta, and others. When the British called Indians as Brutes, instead of becoming furious, Indians would react – “Oh yes sir. We are indeed so and that is why, by divine dispensation, the British Raj has been established over us.“ I was trying to sow seeds of armed revolution to overthrow the British rule in India. The readers can imagine how difficult, well nigh impossible was my task. I was determined .

Lucilla, though she said nothing about a sphere, was still more or less in that condition of mind which has been so often and so fully described to the British public—when the ripe female intelligence, not having the natural resource of a nursery and a husband to manage, turns inwards, and begins to "make a protest" against the existing order of society, and to call the world to account for giving it no due occupation—and to consume itself. She was not the woman to make protests, nor claim for herself the doubtful honours of a false position; but she felt all the same that at her age she had outlived the occupations that were sufficient for her youth. To be sure, there were still the dinners to attend to, a branch of human affairs worthy of the weightiest consideration, and she had a house of her own, as much as if she had been half a dozen times married; but still there are instincts which go even beyond dinners, and Lucilla had become conscious that her capabilities were greater than her work. She was a Power in Carlingford, and she knew it; but still there is little good in the existence of a Power unless it can be made use of for some worthy end. She

Flagyl was clearly effective in the treatment of Lyme disease. But how did it work? As early as 1967 The British Journal of Venereal Diseases had published a study showing Flagyl to be effective in certain cases of syphilis, and that it had an effect on bacterial DNA and RNA irrespective of bacterial replication. Could this be the mechanism of Flagyl’s action against Burrelia burgdorferi? The key to Flagyl’s effectiveness on Lyme, however, was not reported until several months after my study was presented. Dr. O. Brorson, a Norwegian researcher, published a paper on Flagyl and its effect on the cystic forms of Lyme disease six months after I presented my research. The cystic form of Lyme disease, it turns out, is one mechanism that Borrelia burgdorferi utilizes to persist in the body. Dr. Brorson reported that Flagyl would cause Borrelia cysts to rupture, and he went on to publish that he could see under the microscope the cell wall forms of Borrelia burgdorferi (helical/spiral–shaped organisms) transform into cystic forms, and under proper conditions convert back into mobile spirochetes. A review of the medical literature revealed that these cystic forms had, in fact, been reported in syphilis. No one had clearly made the link between Borrelia and a cystic form of the organism that could persist for long periods of time in a dormant state. It was a highly evolved survival mechanism that would allow the organism to reemerge when conditions were optimal. My patient, Mary, had been treated initially with Plaquenil, which according to Dr. Brorson’s research also affects the cystic forms, yet it appeared that it was not powerful enough to destroy the dormant forms and prevent a relapse, or to prevent her from passing it on to her fetus. She had also been treated with drugs that addressed the cell wall and intracellular forms of Lyme. Although Plaquenil has some effect on cystic forms, it is often primarily used in antibiotic regimens with Lyme disease to alkalize the intracellular compartment, modulate autoimmune reactions, and affect essential enzymes necessary for bacterial replication. Clearly, however, it is not powerful enough to destroy enough of the

In terms of innovation in ideas, our nonstate foes leveraged the vast body of literature on guerrilla warfare (in particular Lind et al.’s 4GW) that was developed in the United States. It isn’t unusual that the people who develop these new theories of warfare live in the countries that don’t benefit from them. Advanced Western military theory has historically provided sustenance to our revisionist foes. For example, the British military theorists J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart provided the theoretical basis of armored warfare that Heinz Guderian and others, in the nascent German military before World War II, used to formulate the blitzkrieg. So while the image of al-Qaeda strategists squatting in Afghan caves reading Lind et al.’s 4GW theory may be hard to imagine, it shouldn’t be any more fantastic than Guderian practicing Fuller’s theories with cardboard tanks. Both happened.

Yes! “Books,” she answers. “What kind of books?” “Oh, you know. The usual. The classics. British literature, mainly.” British literature? The Brontës and Austen, I bet. All those romantic hearts-and-flowers types. That’s not good.

in more eloquent words from British writer Gerald Brenan: “The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

IRAN AND PERSIA Despite the Iranian conspiratorial theories cited above, it was not a conspiracy for the British to call Iran ‘Persia’, the French ‘Perse’ the Germans ‘Persien’, and so on. When the Greeks (from whom European civilizations descend) first came across the Iranians, Persian Iranians were ruling that country as the Persian empire. It was therefore no more of a conspiracy for them to call it ‘Persis’ than for the Persians who first came into contact with Ionian Greeks to call the entire Greek lands ‘Ionia’. To this day Iranians refer to Greece as Ionia (i.e., Yunan) and the Greeks as Ionians (i.e., Yunaniyan). Indeed, some scholars, such as Gnoli, have doubted if the Achaemenid Persians described their empire as Iran (or a variation of that term), but this is a generally unresolved question which need not detain us here. The cultural and intellectual menace of the word Farsi needs a brief mention. In recent western usage the word Farsi has been used alternatively for the Persian language. Farsi is the Persian word for ‘Persian’ just as Deutsch is the German word for ‘German’ and Français for ‘French’. But no one would use Deutsch for German or Français for French when speaking English, even though those words are more familiar than Farsi to the English-speaking peoples. Unlike Persian, Farsi has no cultural or historical connotations, and hardly any English-speaker would have heard of ‘Farsi literature’, or would be able to locate it if he or she did. To many Europeans, Persian is known as a language of culture and literature, but very few of them would know the meaning of Farsi even as a language.

All China’s minorities lack outlets of expression. Even in the multi-cultural UK, the views of the ethnic British are heard less frequently than everyone else’s. In China, it is far worse. The minorities are absent from TV shows, movies, literature, popular discourse and are mostly excluded from politics. Now what little dialogue that takes place in Tibet between the locals and the Han is being replaced by death. And despite my ambivalence towards Tibetans, that left me both depressed and unsure of what I was really doing here.

The tall, thin serious man strode in, his dark cloak billowing so dramatically it threatened to extinguish the lamp flame with its draught. He advanced like a malevolent shadow consuming the dim orange light, filling the room with a presence almost more than human.

I thought- This is why men build empires and go out into the desert; to get away from their loved ones and comfortable homes and to sit on floors with Arab chiefs and watch prostitutes.

White women’s presence, coupled with repressive Victorian sexuality, ensured that there would be no shacking up with once-tantalizing Indian lovers. But for the Irish and working-class British sailors and soldiers who kept the Empire running, the administration allowed them sex to release their animal urges. Registers were created. Women and femmes were forced to reside in the Lal Bazaars, red-light districts organized around fucking British men. Damned by an extensive patramyth: literature, surveys, calls for social reform, colonial registers, and codified laws that policed Dalit and Muslim bodies. The 1868 Contagious Diseases Act gave authorities permission to go after women suspected as prostitutes—they could be gynecologically examined without consent, arrested, detained, sent away to be worked to death in a penal colony. An 1881 Census in Bengal declared all unmarried women fifteen and older prostitutes.

It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

Within Animal Farm’s allegory of Soviet Communism, Foxwood represents the United Kingdom, and Mr. Pilkington represents the British ruling class. Animal Farm therefore suggests that Britain is an old-fashioned country, badly run by self-serving aristocrats. This criticism of Britain’s rulers deepens when Mr. Pilkington eats dinner with the pigs in the novella’s final chapter. Mr. Pilkington congratulates Napoleon on his cruel efficiency. He jokes: “If you have your lower animals to contend with […] we have our lower classes!” (Chapter 10). This moment crystallizes the novella’s argument that Soviet totalitarianism and British capitalism are essentially the same: cruel and exploitative.

And I saw how foolish I had been to fuss and worry about 'the right approach' because of course 'the right approach' to all our fellow creatures is just to love them.

Lei giacque tra le sue braccia per tutta la notte, sentendosi sedotta, protetta e amata. Si chiese quando la vita fosse diventata tanto dolce. Percepì che qualcosa di meraviglioso stava iniziando.

Part 2 - Now the problem is India is with multiple cultures, context specific reasons and languages - so protecting value of India means protecting each and every cultural values in India, but when these people turn arrogant their values getting down, that is the problem, you have to withstand the pain to show you are capable, if you are capable then the culture you belong is also capable - this is applicable for anyone, and once your character and your cultural identities are analyzed you will be easily estimated to be fit for something. But in my case, it is totally complicated, First I am Ganapathy K (Son of Krishnamoorthy not Shiv), that born on 14- April 1992 (Approximate Birth day of Lord Rama and Tamil New year and Dr Ambedkar birthday), My family name is Somavarapu (Which means clans of Chandra - Or Monday - Or cold place) My family origin is from Tenali - Guntur, but permanently settled in TN, born in agricultural family (Kamma Naidu (General caste in AP and Telangana) but Identified as Vadugan Naidu (OBC) for reservation benefits as OBC Non Creamy - as made by my ancestors - I did not make this. And Manu smiriti varna system did not take place in south India much like UP or Rajasthan even in ancient times. Even in ancient times, north rulers did not rule south india at all, rather they made friendship sometimes or they made leaders for south people by selecting best fit model. So whomever are said to be kshatriyas in South are Pseudo Kshatriyas or deemed Kshatriyas which means there are no real Kshatriyas in South India - and it was not required much in south. tribal people and indigenous people in south were very strong in ancient time, that they prayed and worshiped only forest based idolizers. they do not even know these Hindustani or Sanskrit things, and Tamil was started from Sangam literature (As per records - And when sangam literature was happening - Lord shiva and Lord Karthikeya was present on the hall - As mentioned on Tholkappiam ) - So ethically Tamil also becomes somehow language of God, Krishnadevraya once said Telugu was given by Lord shiva. And Kannada is kind of poetic language which is mixture of Dravidian style languages with some sanskrit touch and has remarkable historical significance from Ramayana period. My caste (Kamma) as doing agriculture work was regarded as upper sudra by British people but since they knew sanskrit, they were taking warrior roles ( Rudramadevi, munsuri naidu clan, pemmasani clan, kandi nayaka (Srilanka clan ) As Kamma also has interactions with Kapu, Balija, Velama, Telaga and Reddy clans - they were considered as land lords/Zamindari system - later in some places given chowdary and Rao title too. And my intellactual property in Bio sciences and my great granpa wrtings, my family knowledge which includes (Vattelzhuthu - Tamil + Malayalam mixture) sanskrit notes about medicinal plants in western ghats which my great grandpa wrote, my previous incarnation in Rajput family and European family.

The first psychiatrist to look closely at the more extreme forms of sadistic behavior was the eminent German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Besides coining the term “masochism” (named after the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose famous novel, Venus in Furs, deals with a man who craves humiliation), Krafft-Ebing made a major contribution to the literature of morbid psychology with his classic book, Psychopathia Sexualis—a massive compendium of every known perversion, illustrated with hundreds of detailed case histories. At the time of its initial publication in 1886, the book was considered so shocking that its author was nearly expelled from the prestigious British Medico-Psychological Association. Even today, it makes for deeply disturbing reading. Still, it is a significant work, one that clearly demonstrates there’s nothing new about serial murder. Of course, Krafft-Ebing doesn’t use the term “serial murder,” which wouldn’t enter the language for another hundred years. The term he uses is the German word lustmord or “lust-murder.” The essence of this crime is extreme sadistic violence against the victim. The lust-murderer doesn’t just kill his victims. His ultimate pleasure comes from savaging their bodies: disemboweling them, cutting out their genitals, etc. For such blood-crazed sadists, violence is a substitute for sex.

History, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Who was this five-star admiral of the Second World War, who left barely a trace of himself in the historical record? In the literature he is usually painted with a few broad strokes of the brush, and the overall effect is unflattering. Four charges have been laid against King, growing simultaneously louder and less coherent as they have reverberated through the historical echo chamber. First, that he was a foul-tempered martinet who was utterly ruthless and as mean as a snake. Second, that he was a narrow-minded navy partisan, who cared only for the parochial interests of his service. Third, that he did not support the “Europe-first” policy, and campaigned to make the Pacific the main theater of the war. Fourth, that he harbored an obsessive animosity against the British, and did his best to undermine the alliance. There was some truth in the first of those four charges, though King’s abrasiveness and ruthlessness have been exaggerated, and were facets of a more complex personality. As for the second, third, and fourth, they do not stick.

Serve Britannia (The Sonnet) Let us build a new Britain, A Britain with actual heart's beauty, Where we shall right our wrongs, Instead of boasting our atrocities. Let us build a new Britain, Where commoners are king and queen, Where unlike our tribal ancestors, Our habit is not occupation but caring. Let us herald a new Britain, Where there is no exit only inclusion, Where no one bows to no one for honor, And each lives with self-determination. Serve Britannia! Britannia, serve as aid. Britain never again shall make others slave.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900; I'd like people to look at it and think, 'How the hell did he end up right over there?

That is the problem, and that is why there is now no protection against Eugenic or any other experiments. If the men who took away beer as an unlawful pleasure had paused for a moment to define the lawful pleasures, there might be a different situation. If the men who had denied one liberty had taken the opportunity to affirm other liberties, there might be some defence for them. But it never occurs to them to admit any liberties at all. It never so much as crosses their minds. Hence the excuse for the last oppression will always serve as well for the next oppression; and to that tyranny there can be no end.

It is only in recent years that tales of dragons and mythological beasts have been relegated to the ranks of "mere" children's stories and fairy tales. But it is wise to remember that such stories shaped humankind's love of literature, of all manner of written work. The image of the roaming bard, gracing the ears of his listeners with an account of gods and goddesses, of Cerberus and the Minotaur, of narratives now considered as classics set aside for serious study in their original and ancient languages, is one we would do well to remember. Those tales are the foundation of us, of our very societies. And so perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss something "fantastical" as being beneath notice, as it would be akin to dismissing a gleaming facet of human history from our time on this earth.

What we have at present in Scotland is a linguistic continuum between Scots-English - the cumulative result of the attempts of several generations of Scots to speak English - and what is left of our own language, now largely confined to those who have not been deracinated by the influwnce of educational policy. Nevertheless, the Scots language still survives, incipient and fragmented, in the speech of the people and in a substantial body of recorded literature, although what is left of spoken Scots is coming under increasing pressure from English as a result of the influence of British radio and television. The problem for those who are interested in the survival and further evolution of Scots, is not how best to doctor it so that is can masquerade as English, but how to distinguish it clearly from English in writing, as a language which has a character and rules of its own.

Jane Austen's profound concern with good manners was thus not simply a reflection of a cloistered gentility: it was a form of politics -- an involvement with a widespread attempt to save the nation by correcting, monitoring, and elevating its morals.

America's core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded American society. The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.

I don’t know if I’ve written about this and I haven’t talked about this much, so in a way what I’m about to say is self-condemnatory, but I think it is one of the greatest tragedies of the American evangelical church—and I think in large measure the British evangelical church—that in our focus on how to get saved, we completely lost the sense of what it meant not to be saved, but to be created. And so many Christians grew up with very little appreciation of the idea that we are made as the image of God. And so long as that was true, I think—and I’m not saying it was inevitable—but I think that made it far more likely that the law of God would be detached from the person of God. And then in understanding the whole of Scripture, the imperatives of the gospel would be detached from the indicatives of the gospel. The truest Reformed faith did not see the teaching of Scripture in the somewhat narrower spectrum of—for example, Martin Luther, or that stage of the reformation. Luther says things are either law or they’re gospel... But it seems to me that in the best Reformed tradition, the story of the Bible is not law and gospel; the story of the Bible is actually—the way I would put it, and I could demonstrate this from the literature—is the grace of creation as the image of God. Now, we use the word grace and we’ve almost defined it in terms of sin. The Reformed fathers didn’t define it in terms of sin. They defined it in terms of God—his graciousness—so that creation is an act of condescension—his relationship with Adam and Eve, making them as his image. We are non-existence that he brings into existence, and he didn’t need to bring them into existence... The creation of man and woman as the image of God and all that that means is an act of infinite grace. It’s nothingness being brought into creation to be a miniature likeness of God. And so the whole story is one of graciousness and promise implied in the statements that are made—now, that’s another long story. And therefore, in order that the man and the woman would grow and would grow in fulfilling their commission to, as I say, garden the whole earth. They’re given this little garden and they’re to extend it to the end of the earth, which for all I know, might have taken millennia of their family, but probably speedier development of technology than there has actually been. All of this sets our existence within the context of the person of God, the generosity of God, the integrity of God. But then comes the fall. The restoration, therefore... is always a means of answering the question, How does God restore us to what we were originally created to be and then take us on to what we were ultimately destined to be?

when looking at the literature currently available, there seems to be much discussion on practical contemporary issues such as the sharing of resources or personnel, but very little on the history of Global/World relationships. Partnership is only mentioned in brief passages in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission or Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder’s Constants in Context. In J. Andrew Kirk’s What is Mission? an entire chapter is dedicated to this subject (chapter 10— “Sharing in Partnership”); however, only a few paragraphs are dedicated to how partnership has been understood historically. To date, the most complete study on this topic has been done by Lothar Bauerochse in his book Learning to Live Together: Interchurch Partnerships as Ecumenical Communities of Learning. Although Bauerochse’s main focus involves case studies on the relationships between German Protestant churches and their African partners, the first section entails an historical analysis of the term “partnership.” In his analysis, Bauerochse states that “the term partnership is a term of the colonial era . . . It is a formula of the former ‘rulers,’ who with it wished to both signal a relinquishment of power and also to secure their influence in the future. Therefore, the term can also serve both in colonial policy and mission policy to justify continuing rights of the white minority.”5 This understanding then serves as the lens through which he interprets the partnership discourse, reminding the reader that although the term was meant to connote an eventual leveling of power dynamics in relationships, it was also used by those with power to “secure their influence in the future.” This analysis is largely true. As we will see in chapter three, when the term partnership was introduced into the colonial debate, it was closely aligned with the concept of trusteeship. Later, as will be discussed in chapter six, the term partnership was also used in the late colonial period by the British as a way to maintain their colonies while offering the hope of freedom in the future; a step forward from trusteeship, but short of autonomy and independence. During colonial times, once the term partnership was introduced into ecumenical discussions, many arguments identical to those used by colonial powers for the retention of their colonies were used by church and missionary leaders to deny autonomy to the younger churches. Later, when looking at partnership in the post-World War

All through history every culture on earth has produced its distinct literature - American literature, British literature, Latino Literature, Arabic literature, Turkish literature, European literature, Bengali literature and so on. I am none of these, because I am all of these - Naskar is the amalgamation of all of world's cultures. Naskar is the first epitome of integrated Earth literature - where there is no inferior, no superior - no greater, no lesser. Soulfulness of Rumiland, heartfulness of Martíland, correctiveness of MLKland, sweetness of Tagoreland - merge them all in the fire of love, and lo emerges Naskarland - merge them all in the fire of love, and lo emerges lightland.

It has become the vogue for some writers in Australia to refer to me, apparently under the impression that they are using a derogatory expression, as an 'anglophile'. I certainly am, and would be sadly disappointed if I thought that a majority of my fellow citizens were not of the same mind. I love Britain because I love Australia, and like to think that I have done her some service. I cannot go anywhere in Australia without being reminded of our British inheritance; our system of responsible government and Parliamentary institutions, our adherence to the rule of law and, indeed, our systems of law themselves; our traditions of integrity in high places and of incorruptibility in our Civil Service. We derive all these things from Westminster. Our language comes to us from Britain and so does the bulk of our literature. To have no love for a relatively small community in the North Sea which created and handed on these vital matters would be, in my mind, a miserable act of ingratitude. The fact that in Australia we have received all these things, and have made all our own notable contributions to their development, not only fills me with pride but strengthens my affection.

The relationship between an artist’s biography and his writing is always a difficult subject,” concedes Worden, “but there can be no other important writer since the invention of printing for whom we are unable to demonstrate any relationship at all.” Why didn’t Shakespeare bother to educate his children? His daughters couldn’t write. One signed with what Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, paleographer and director of the British Museum, called a “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of doing with the pen.” The other, he concluded, “could not write at all, for she signed with a mark.” How could a writer—any writer, let alone the greatest writer in the English language—be indifferent to the literacy of his children?

In the online magazine Quillette a British journalist named Oliver Kamm accused me of “conspiracism,” associated me with Holocaust deniers (my crime being the “denial” of Shakespeare), and called for the Atlantic to retract my essay.

memang narang, we still make use of its linguistic legacy. References to the fruit can be found in Sanskrit and ancient Hindi literature, including the Charaka Samhita, a medical text thought to be a thousand years old. It’s here the word narang or naranga first emerges, which along the Silk Road became the Persian neranji, and eventually naranja in Spain, laranja in Portugal, arancia in Italy and orange in France. In the 1590s, soon after the arrival of the fruit on British shores, Shakespeare included the reference ‘orange tawny beard’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The editor of a 1793 edition of Shakespeare’s works simply omitted the sonnets because “the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.” Scholars continued wringing their hands well into the twentieth century. “The story Shakespeare recounts of his moral—or rather his immoral—predicament… must certainly, in the interests of the British Empire, be smothered up,” the critic L. P. Smith concluded in 1933.

In 1543 the historian John Leland wrote, for example: A Stately place for rare and glorious shew There is, which Tamis with wandring stream doth dowse; Times past, by name of Avon men it knew: Here Henrie, the Eighth of that name, built a house So sumptuous, as that on such an one (Seeke through the world) the bright Sunne never shone. Leland’s words were quoted in the exhaustive history of Britain published by William Camden, Ben Jonson’s tutor. So the description would certainly have been known to Jonson. In another work, Leland explained that “Avon” was a shortening of the Celtic-Roman name “Avondunum,” meaning a fortified place (dunum) by a river (avon), which “the common people by corruption called Hampton.” Raphael Holinshed similarly wrote in his sprawling 1577 book of British history, Chronicles, that “we now pronounce Hampton for Avondune.” William Lambarde in his Topographical and Historical Dictionary of England affirmed that Hampton Court is “corruptly called Hampton for Avondun or Avon, an usual

in 1858, however, the Folio was bequeathed to the British Museum, and Collier’s fraudulent claims began to unravel. Experts at the museum concluded that the annotations were modern forgeries imitating Renaissance script. (Microscope analysis revealed pencil annotations underneath the archaic-looking ink.) But it would take years to sort Collier’s other fraudulent discoveries from his genuine ones.

In 1794 William Henry Ireland, a twenty-year-old Londoner, claimed to have discovered documents in the old trunk of a mysterious gentleman collector. The documents provided everything the literary world had longed for: a love letter from a young Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway, in which he had enclosed a lock of his hair; Shakespeare’s letters to and from Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton; Shakespeare’s haggling with a printer over the terms of publication of one of his plays (“ I do esteem much my play, having taken much care writing of it…. Therefore I cannot in the least lower my price”); a note from the Queen thanking Shakespeare for his “pretty verses” and inviting him to perform for her at Hampton Court; and, mercifully, Shakespeare’s Protestant “Profession of Faith,” putting an end to the dreadful possibility that the glory of the British nation might have been a secret Catholic. Ireland also “found” Shakespeare’s books inscribed with his name and marginal notes. And then, to top it all off, the greatest treasure of all: the original manuscript of King Lear in Shakespeare’s own hand, including a prefatory note from Shakespeare to his “gentle readers.” The literary world fell for the forgeries, hook, line, and sinker.

Britain may have a few things to take pride in, Conan Doyle and Doctor Who to name a few - but colonialism is not one of them.

he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Visitors noted that Rom’s garden was decorated with polished skulls buried in the ground, the garden gnomes of the Congo then. But Kurtz’s compound has no skulls buried in the ground but rather freshly severed “heads on the stakes” that “seemed to sleep at the top of that pole.” As the British scholar Johan Adam Warodell notes, none of the “exclusively European prototypes” for Kurtz advanced by woke professors and historians followed this native mode of landscape gardening. By contrast, dozens of accounts of African warlords and slavers in the Congo published before 1898 described rotting heads on poles (“a wide-reaching area marked by a grass fence, tied to high poles, which at the very top were decorated with grinning, decomposing skulls,” as one 1888 account had it). Far from being “one of the most scathing indictments of [European] imperialism in all literature,” as Hochschild declares it, Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of the absence of European imperialism in all literature. Kurtz is a symbol of the pre-colonial horrors of the Congo, horrors that the EIC, however fitfully, was bringing to an end.