Magnificent Obsession Quotes

One tiny Hobbit against all the evil the world could muster. A sane being would have given up, but Samwise burned with a magnificent madness, a glowing obsession to surmount every obstacle, to find Frodo, destroy the Ring, and cleanse Middle Earth of its festering malignancy. He knew he would try again. Fail, perhaps. And try once more. A thousand, thousand times if need be, but he would not give up the quest.

Everyone should have at least one magnificent obsession. It's a life jacket when the ship goes down

If you feel far from God right now, guess who moved? You’re only a decision away from reconnecting.

On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

Every Christian should become an ambassador of Christ . . .every Christian should be so intoxicated with Christ and so filled with holy fervor that nothing could ever quench his [passion] . . .Let us capture some of the magnificent obsession that [the] early Christians had!

Create something beautiful every day. Value each day as special and unique. Your obsession with past failures or future desires robs you of the magnificence of today.

The requiem mass is not at all gay," Erik's voice resumed, "whereas the wedding mass- you can take my word for it- is magnificent! You must take a resolution and know your own mind! I can't go on living like this, like a mole in a burrow! Don Juan Triumphant is finished; and now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets. You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight. You are crying! You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! All I wanted was to be loved for myself. If you loved me I should be as gentle as a lamb; and you could do anything with me that you pleased.

Sometimes when I open my Bible to read, a verse leaps off the page and I know God is speaking to me. Sometimes I read and nothing seems to be illuminated. Sometimes I pray and have the keen sense that He is listening to every word and will answer me. Sometimes when I pray, I have no awareness that He's anywhere around. Sometimes when I go to church or draw aside for some quiet reflection, I have the overwhelming sense that Jesus is right beside me. At other times in the exact same settings, I have no conscious awareness of His presence at all. And I know by each experience — as I read my Bible and pray and work and worship — that He is teaching me to live by FAITH, not by my feelings.

We cannot move casually into a better future. We cannot casually pursue the goal we have set for ourselves. A goal that is casually pursued is not a goal; at best it is a wish, and wishes are little more than self-delusion. Wishes are an anesthetic to be used by the unambitious, a narcotic that dulls their awareness of their own desperate condition. It is possible to plan our future so carefully and so clearly that when the plan is complete, we can become so inspired by it, it will become our "magnificent obsession." The challenge is to let this obsession fuel the fire that heats our talent and our skills to the boiling point so that we are propelled into a whole new future.

There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is quiet and even, we take the path of least resistance, and then wonder why we feel bored. A man who is determined and active doesn't pay much attention to 'luck'. If things go badly, he takes a deep breath and redoubles his effort. And he quickly discovers that his moments of deepest happiness often come after such efforts. The man who has become accustomed to a passive existence becomes preoccupied with 'luck'; it may become an obsession. When things go well, he is delighted and good humored; when they go badly, he becomes gloomy and petulant. He is unhappy—or dissatisfied—most of the time, for even when he has no cause for complaint, he feels that gratitude would be premature; things might go wrong at any moment; you can't really trust the world... Gambling is one basic response to this passivity, revealing the obsession with luck, the desire to make things happen. The absurdity about this attitude is that we fail to recognize the active part we play in making life a pleasure. When my will is active, my whole mental and physical being works better, just as my digestion works better if I take exercise between meals. I gain an increasing feeling of control over my life, instead of the feeling of helplessness (what Sartre calls 'contingency') that comes from long periods of passivity. Yet even people who are intelligent enough to recognize this find the habit of passivity so deeply ingrained that they find themselves holding their breath when things go well, hoping fate will continue to be kind.

To visualize this dance, the transparent components of the cell had to be coloured using a stain. As it happened, the stains that were best able to colour the chromosomes were acidic. Unfortunately, these stains tended to dissolve the mitochondria; their obsession with the nucleus meant that cytologists were simply dissolving the evidence. Other stains were ambivalent, colouring mitochondria only transiently, for the mitochondria themselves rendered the stain colourless. Their rather ghostly appearance and disappearance was scarcely conducive to firm belief. Finally Carl Benda demonstrated, in 1897, that mitochondria do have a corporeal existence in cells. He defined them as ‘granules, rods, or filaments in the cytoplasm of nearly all cells … which are destroyed by acids or fat solvents.’ His term, mitochondria (pronounced ‘my-toe-con-dree-uh’), was derived from the Greek mitos, meaning thread, and chondrin, meaning small grain. Although his name alone stood the test of time, it was then but one among many. Mitochondria have revelled in more than thirty magnificently obscure names, including chondriosomes, chromidia, chondriokonts, eclectosomes, histomeres, microsomes, plastosomes, polioplasma, and vibrioden.

She thought constantly about Paris and avidly read all the society pages in the papers. Their accounts of receptions, celebrations, the clothes worn, and all the accompanying delights enjoyed, whetted her appetite still further. Above all, however, she was fascinated by what these reports merely hinted at. The cleverly phrased allusions half-lifted a veil beyond which could be glimpsed devastatingly attractive horizons promising a whole new world of wicked pleasure. From where she lived, she looked on Paris as representing the height of all magnificent luxury as well as licentiousness...she conjured up the images of all the famous men who made the headlines and shone like brilliant comets in the darkness of her sombre sky. She pictured the madly exciting lives they must lead, moving from one den of vice to the next, indulging in never-ending and extraordinarily voluptuous orgies, and practising such complex and sophisticated sex as to defy the imagination. It seemed to her that hidden behind the façades of the houses lining the canyon-like boulevards of the city, some amazing erotic secret must lie. "The uneventful life she lived had preserved her like a winter apple in an attic. Yet she was consumed from within by unspoken and obsessive desires. She wondered if she would die without ever having tasted the wicked delights which life had to offer, without ever, not even once, having plunged into the ocean of voluptuous pleasure which, to her, was Paris.

Pitt was one of the marvels of the century, a leader who dazzled sober politicians and the crowd alike. He drew his peculiar appeal from some inner quality of temperament as well as mind, a quality which allowed, indeed drove, him to disregard both conventional wisdom and opposition and to push through to what he wanted. He was an “original” in an age suspicious of the original. He got away with being what he was, scorning the commonplace and the expected and explaining himself in a magnificent oratorical flow that inspired as much as it informed. Pitt’s powers of concentration shone from his fierce eyes, as did his belief in himself; in the crisis of war he said, “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.” He was obsessed even more by a vision of English greatness, a vision that fed on hatred of France and contempt for Spain. Pitt had despised the fumbling efforts of his predecessors to cope with the French on the Continent, and he was impatient with the incompetence of English generals in America.

Americans were deluded, Arendt insisted, if they thought their political institutions were meant to establish a democracy. That was never the intent of the Founding Fathers, who had read the ancient Greeks attentively and worried as much about tyrannical majorities as did German-Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s popular and populist regime. They were kindred spirits. “What men” they were, Arendt exclaimed in breathless admiration of the Founders, and how little understood in modern times, with its ethos of democratic egalitarianism. The recent arrival felt obliged to lecture her native-born countrymen by reminding them about their true history. “It’s a great mistake if you believe that what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of minorities.” Such words had an oddly familiar ring at the time, though emanating from a political corner far removed from Arendt and her friends. “A republic, not a democracy” was the rallying cry of the extreme, often loony, reactionaries gathered around the John Birch Society during the 1950s and after. But though Arendt, with her stress on individual freedom, shared language and even long-term worries with the far right, she could never be mistaken for one of them—not with her contempt for bourgeois, money-obsessed self-interest, her support for trade unions, her identification with the weak and vulnerable, her anti-anti-Communism, her determined pluralism, and her praise of immigration as the means by which the United States continually revitalized itself. The “magnificence” of the country, she said, “consists in the fact that from the beginning this new order did not shut itself off from the outside world.” (She also said that the attempt to equate freedom with free enterprise was a “monstrous falsehood.”) In

In 1910 Leroux had his greatest literary success with Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera). This is both a detective story and a dark romantic melodrama and was inspired by Leroux’s passion for and obsession with the Paris Opera House. And there is no mystery as to why he found the building so fascinating because it is one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century. The opulent design and the fantastically luxurious furnishings added to its glory, making it the most famous and prestigious opera house in all Europe. The structure comprises seventeen floors, including five deep and vast cellars and sub cellars beneath the building. The size of the Paris Opera House is difficult to conceive. According to an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1879, just after it first opened to the public, the Opera House contained 2,531 doors with 7,593 keys. There were nine vast reservoirs, with two tanks holding a total of 22,222 gallons of water. At the time there were fourteen furnaces used to provide the heating, and dressing-rooms for five hundred performers. There was a stable for a dozen or so horses which were used in the more ambitious productions. In essence then the Paris Opera House was like a very small magnificent city. During a visit there, Leroux heard the legend of a bizarre figure, thought by many to be a ghost, who had lived secretly in the cavernous labyrinth of the Opera cellars and who, apparently, engineered some terrible accidents within the theatre as though he bore it a tremendous grudge. These stories whetted Leroux’s journalistic appetite. Convinced that there was some truth behind these weird tales, he investigated further and acquired a series of accounts relating to the mysterious ‘ghost’. It was then that he decided to turn these titillating titbits of theatre gossip into a novel. The building is ideal for a dark, fantastic Grand Guignol scenario. It is believed that during the construction of the Opera House it became necessary to pump underground water away from the foundation pit of the building, thus creating a huge subterranean lake which inspired Leroux to use it as one of his settings, the lair, in fact, of the Phantom. With its extraordinary maze-like structure, the various stage devices primed for magical stage effects and that remarkable subterranean lake, the Opera House is not only the ideal backdrop for this romantic fantasy but it also emerges as one of the main characters of this compelling tale. In using the real Opera House as its setting, Leroux was able to enhance the overall sense of realism in his novel.

He loved his wife and daughter. It was perhaps a stalwart affection rather than a magnificent obsession, but nonetheless he didn't doubt that if called upon to do so he would sacrifice his own life in a heartbeat for them. And he also knew that there would be no more hankering for something else, something beyond, for the hot slices of colour or the intensity of war or romance. That was all behind him, he had a different kind of duty now, not to himself, not to his country, but to this small knot of a family.

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Your tests don’t have to define you. Your compatibility doesn’t have to be a ceiling over which your relationship can never rise. Your past hurts don’t have to constitute the first steps in a journey toward divorce court. We worship, serve, and are empowered by a supernatural God who can lift us above our scientific limitations and create something special out of something very ordinary. These tests don’t account for the power of a magnificent obsession.

It is the ultimate game-changer. If the resurrection is true, then everything has changed. As Jaroslav Pelikan once said, ‘If Jesus Christ rose from the dead, nothing else matters. If Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, nothing else matters.

You will find success when your passion becomes your magnificent obsession.

Your enthusiasm for the continuing development of your team members will never wane. There’s a great old classic movie called Magnificent Obsession, in which the mentor tells the star, who is about to make a major life change, “This will obsess you, but it will be a magnificent obsession.” Finding strengths will be your magnificent obsession. The only time you get to work on your people’s weaknesses is when they ask you to. Any attempt on your part to work on their weaknesses before they’re ready is wasted time, both yours and theirs.

For the general consumer, it was exciting to get photos back and see how they turned out. For me, and for Annabelle when she went into the darkroom, it was an obsession. In the darkroom, the images captured on film were projected onto photo paper and only became visible when the paper was submerged in a bath of chemicals. Then, the image slowly came to life, gradually appearing like a living, breathing thing being born. And when the photo was of something special or magnificent, the process was electrifying. Like I said, Annabelle had a passion for the darkroom.

You do want to Katie. I see you. I see that you enjoy this. But you need a man who can show you that you can be worthy and magnificent even while you are on your knees, crawling and begging to be filled with cock. That you can be treasured outside of the bedroom while you are spat on and degraded in it.

Renard was obliged to report ruefully to his master that the laws of England were so unsatisfactory that it was impossible to have people executed unless they had previously been proved guilty.

At Lavenham in Suffolk, ten thousand men planned to converge in active protest; it was said that they failed only because the clappers had been removed from the church bells that were to signal the start of the uprising.

Exorcism, a reaction in force, with a battering ram, is the true poem of the prisoner. In the very space of suffering and obsession, you introduce such exaltation, such magnificent violence, welded to the hammering of words, that the evil is progressively dissolved, replaced by an airy demonic sphere—a marvelous state!

African mythology is integral to this story. Learning about Senegalese fairies, the African version of a unicorn, the bultungin shape-shifters of the Kanem-Bornu Empire, and the Ninki Nanka river monster only added to my motivation. Black gods, goddesses, mermaids, and other creatures both deadly and magnificent … and all with African origins. Creating a story blending these and West African history became a passionate obsession.

But the most important part of planning and goal-setting is to see in our "mind's eye" the major objective that we are pursuing. This is the "magnificent obsession" that we discussed earlier. This is the very nerve center of our ambition. This is what drives us.

la plus belle des savants, la plus savante des belles

The city started sooner than I expected it to. In ten years it had crawled out along the highway, covering new farms with the concrete squares of suburban developments. On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.

Years ago, Once Upon a Time was Right Now. And eventually, Right Now will become Once Upon a Time. In fact, it just did. Time is funny like that. In most stories time is very important. Not in this one. The story may have horses and not cars, but really it could happen now like it did then. Then being Once Upon a Time, years and years ago. The story is one of passion, and last time I checked, passion was still around. It exists in love, hate, obsession. For instance, I have a passion for pickled herring. I can’t live without it. Every day I have to have some. In my salad, raw, on my sandwiches. It tastes great on hamburgers. However, this story is not about pickled herring, but it does have love, hate, and obsession. I tell you about these things first because it is these things that cause everything else, as we know they are prone to do. And there’s a lot of other things in this story, too: There are monsters and mobbers, heroes and heroines, villains and thieves, power and conquest, murder and mayhem (sounds like politics, doesn’t it?), beasts and battles, and last but not least, pride and honor. Oh, and don’t forget arugula! Arugula is very good, though not as good as pickled herring. Even arugula has a place in the story. And what a magnificent story it is! I give myself great credit for coming-up with it. OK. Slight lie. I didn’t (technically) come-up with it. It was actually told to me over and over again by my grandfather. He didn’t come-up with it either, though. I think he got it from his grandfather. And I’m not exactly sure where his grandfather got it from. Probably from some old folklore or something. But as far as I know, it’s a true story. Anyway, if credit is to be given, I guess you can give it to my grandfather, cause he always told it so well. I’ve done some of what ya might call “editing,” but basically I tried to tell it just like he did (he died some years back). I only hope I can give you what he gave me, even though he didn’t give me this story because this entire paragraph was a complete and utter lie. Either way, I think you’ll enjoy what comes...

Los Angeles is the City of Dreams, the City of Angels, a city blessed and cursed with a glorious dream and façade of hopes -- glitter sprinkled on top if its sprawling expanse. It is a city without a center, a city with a rich and fabled past often bestowed with nostalgic memories not entirely based on fact; an erasure of memory. Without a distinct ancestry, it is often seen and referred to as a whore. The city is made up of so many distinct parts, communities intertwined and fraying at the edges. Sitting on top of one another, Los Angeles is seemingly without borders, an area of pulsing, moving bodies all swaying with the energy of the city’s rich and unique cultures. Navigating Los Angeles is an experience in itself. By way of its intricate mapping of freeways, streets and avenues, the veins and arteries of its body possess the inhabitant to follow these lifelines, dependent upon its circulating blood to survive. The body of Los Angeles makes one feel as if they can be instantly rewarded and punished by its beauty all in one moment. Los Angeles, the femme fatale, can lure one in with its bright lights, swaying palm trees, and warm sunshine yet punish at the same time – all in one sway of her hips. When the warm Santa Ana’s blow in on a summer’s night, dry and majestic, one can feel as though they have just kissed her lips, but the poison soon follows. Attracted to a dream, they pilgrimage to the City and become enraptured by the multi-faceted qualities of her magnificence. But what are we truly looking for? Many people come to the city, obsessed with an image and enraptured by an Angel. But the dichotomy that we find in her beauty is all too telling of how we see each other. Los Angeles is an angel, yet she is also a whore. Los Angeles as the femme fatale has been noted in Los Angeles film noir since the 1930s. The city itself is seductive, alluring, glamorous, and wanton. Yet she uses these qualities to her advantage, shattering the hopes and dreams of those who fall prey all too easily.

Tridentine Creed and the Tridentine Mass (from Tridentum, the Latin name for Trent), which remained in use for the next four centuries;

consumption that had accounted for his father, his elder brother and his bastard son, and which was soon to carry off his legitimate son, King Edward VI.

For her part, Kathleen was the same as she had always been, talkative, earnest, amusing, ready to argue when she disagreed with him. He was the one who was different. He had become obsessed with Kathleen, so fascinated by everything she thought and did that he couldn’t tear his gaze from her. Half the time he wanted to do everything possible to fill her with happiness, while the rest of the time he was tempted to throttle her. He had never known such agonizing frustration, wanting her, wanting far more than she was willing to give. He was reduced to pursuing her, trying to catch her in corners like some lecherous lord playing a game of slap-and-tickle with a housemaid. Fondling and kissing her in the library, sliding his hand beneath her skirts on the back stairs. One morning, after having gone out on an early ride with her, he pulled her into a dark corner of the harness room, coaxing and caressing until he’d finally had his way with her against the wall. And even then, in the disorienting seconds after a magnificent release, he wanted more of her. Every second of the day.

My back arches involuntarily. My mouth opens wide. I convulse helplessly as Kage whispers every hot filthy thing a man can say to a woman, words of praise and sexual obsession. “I love this greedy wet cunt—" “Come for me, my beautiful slut—" “You’re fucking magnificent—" “This gorgeous pussy is mine.

believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here—artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical, religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. Mostly, you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration. You might miss the signal because you’re watching TV, or shopping, or brooding over how angry you are at somebody, or pondering your failures and mistakes, or just generally really busy. The idea will try to wave you down (perhaps for a few moments; perhaps for a few months; perhaps even for a few years), but when it finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else. But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention. And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?” At this point, you have two options for how to respond. What

Actually, the biggest danger to the Christian church does not come from the persecution without, but from heresy within.

The good news can be summarized in this way. You are far worse than you think you are, and you are more loved than you ever imagined you could be. Jesus came to show us both.

The message of the cross is not only that there is nothing you can do to oblige God to accept you, but nothing you need to do. It's all been done. But we have to have the humility to accept it, and luxuriate in it.

Learning to sacrifice is easy. Start by giving a little of yourself, every day. Give a little time to your friends. Give a little of your treasure to a worthy cause. Give a little love to your family. Every day—without fail—give a little of yourself. The giving will become a habit, a part of your character. In a month, in a year, in a decade, in a lifetime, all that sacrifice will add up to something special. If you do this, the sacrifice will be a blessing, a reward, a magnificent obsession, and no burden will be too great—and you will leave behind a legacy worthy of respect and admiration. A hero.

Francis asked his sister Margaret, Duchess of Alençon, to do the honours in her place, but she flatly refused to meet ‘the King of England’s whore’.

It was the last time in history that a pope was to crown an emperor; on that day the seven-hundred-year-old tradition, which had begun in ad 800, when Pope Leo III had laid the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne, was brought to an end.

Daivi Astra: Daivi = Divine; Astra = Weapon. A term used in ancient Hindu epics to describe weapons of mass destruction Dandakaranya: Aranya = forest. Dandak is the ancient name for modern Maharashtra and parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. So Dandakaranya means the forests of Dandak Deva: God Dharma: Dharma literally translates as religion. But in traditional Hindu belief, it means far more than that. The word encompasses holy, right knowledge, right living, tradition, natural order of the universe and duty. Essentially, dharma refers to everything that can be classified as ‘good’ in the universe. It is the Law of Life Dharmayudh: The holy war Dhobi: Washerman Divyadrishti: Divine sight Dumru: A small, hand-held, hour-glass shaped percussion instrument Egyptian women: Historians believe that ancient Egyptians, just like ancient Indians, treated their women with respect. The anti-women attitude attributed to Swuth and the assassins of Aten is fictional. Having said that, like most societies, ancient Egyptians also had some patriarchal segments in their society, which did, regrettably, have an appalling attitude towards women Fire song: This is a song sung by Guna warriors to agni (fire). They also had songs dedicated to the other elements viz: bhūmi (earth), jal (water), pavan (air or wind), vyom or shunya or akash (ether or void or sky) Fravashi: Is the guardian spirit mentioned in the Avesta, the sacred writings of the Zoroastrian religion. Although, according to most researchers, there is no physical description of Fravashi, the language grammar of Avesta clearly shows it to be feminine. Considering the importance given to fire in ancient Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, I’ve assumed the Fravashi to be represented by fire. This is, of course, a fictional representation Ganesh-Kartik relationship: In northern India, traditional myths hold Lord Kartik as older than Lord Ganesh; in large parts of southern India, Lord Ganesh is considered elder. In my story, Ganesh is older than Kartik. What is the truth? Only Lord Shiva knows Guruji: Teacher; ji is a term of respect, added to a name or title Gurukul: The family of the guru or the family of the teacher. In ancient times, also used to denote a school Har Har Mahadev: This is the rallying cry of Lord Shiva’s devotees. I believe it means ‘All of us are Mahadevs’ Hariyupa: This city is currently known as Harappa. A note on the cities of Meluha (or as we call it in modern times, the Indus Valley Civilisation): historians and researchers have consistently marvelled at the fixation that the Indus Valley Civilisation seemed to have for water and hygiene. In fact historian M Jansen used the term ‘wasserluxus’ (obsession with water) to describe their magnificent obsession with the physical and symbolic aspects of water, a term Gregory Possehl builds upon in his brilliant book, The Indus Civilisation — A Contemporary Perspective. In the book, The Immortals

Ever in tune with her emotions, Victoria had taken to the performance of bereavement with aplomb. This first experience in 1844 of ‘real grief’, as she put it, made a ‘lasting impression’ on her, she told Uncle Leopold, so much so that she admitted, ‘one loves to cling to one’s grief’.31Years later, in a conversation with Vicky about ensuring that even young children wore mourning, she had insisted: ‘you must promise me that if I should die your child or children and those around you should mourn; this really must be, for I have such strong feelings on this subject’.32By 1861, therefore, Victoria was already a master of the long and flamboyant mourning protocols that were in vogue, enthroning her own particular maudlin celebration of grief as a virtue to be emulated by all.

She would later recall how often Albert had remarked on her own indomitable lust for life: ‘I do not cling to life,’ he had told her not long before his death, ‘You do; but I set no store by it. If I knew that those I love were well cared for, I should be quite ready to die tomorrow.’ More prophetically he had added that he was sure that ‘if I had a severe illness, I should give up at once, I should not struggle for life.’ It was an awful admission to make to a wife whose physical robustness was so visible, but he had, he told her, ‘no tenacity in life.

Late that night, before he went to bed, Howard Elphinstone went in to see Prince Albert’s body. His face was calm and peaceful. Elphinstone had known all along that the Prince ‘had a fixed idea, that he would die of the 1st fever he got’, but nevertheless he was distressed that the Prince had not tried to fight his illness. ‘He had gone without a struggle, but likewise without saying a word’, to the end a stranger in a foreign land, and longing still for his beloved Coburg.

He had been born three months after his cousin Princess Victoria, on 26 August 1819, and was delivered by the same German midwife – Charlotte Heidenreich von-Siebold – at the Schloss Rosenau, four miles from Coburg.

Fires were kept blazing with beech logs in all the reception rooms – the Queen did not like the smell of coal, although her pathological intolerance of heat was such that she ordained that the rooms should be kept at a temperature of only sixty degrees and she had thermometers in ivory cases mounted on every chimneypiece in order to check that her directive was adhered to.

There is no one to call me Victoria now,’ she had wept, though this is the popularly quoted version of a far more wrenching form of the loss of intimacy, as she expressed it to her German-speaking relatives: ‘I have no one now in the world to call me “du”,’ she had told Princess Mary Adelaide.

The eulogies for Prince Albert were in stark contrast to the many damning ones that had appeared on the deaths of George IV in 1830 and William IV in 1837. Previous kings, let alone prince consorts, had been nothing in comparison with him, according to the leader-writer of the Glasgow Herald, who described how the ‘gloomy Philip of Spain’, husband of Queen Mary, had been disliked, as too ‘the ‘reckless and unprincipled debauché’ Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. In comparison with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne, Albert had been a paragon.

But it was not just the Christian community that paid homage in their churches that day. Among the Jewish community, especially of London, Prince Albert was mourned in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. The Jews, who had much to thank the Prince for his impartiality on religious matters, marked the occasion with special services in synagogues, several of them draped in black. Sermons on the dead Prince were delivered at London’s historic Sephardi synagogue (the Bevis Marks in the City) and the two Ashkenazi congregations (the Great and the Hambro synagogues). At the West London synagogue every seat was filled long before the service and the roads leading up to it were jammed with vehicles. Here the congregation heard a sermon by Dr Marks taking as its text the words of Jeremiah IX:19: ‘A voice of lamentation is heard from Zion. How are we bereaved!’ And at his own privately built synagogue on his estate in Ramsgate, the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore and his wife attended a special service where the reading desk was covered with black cloth, ‘the only symbol of mourning we ever had in our synagogue’. All in all, as one British Jew later reported to a friend in South Africa, there had been ‘not a dry eye in the synagogues’; prayers for Prince Albert had continued all day. ‘The people mourned for him as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better’ was his somewhat unorthodox conclusion.

On the day after Albert died, when she had taken the Duchess of Sutherland into the King’s Room to see his body, the Queen had turned as they both looked down at Albert’s dead face and asked plaintively, ‘Will they do him justice now?’ By day’s end, 23 December 1861, there was no one in the country who could have doubted the extent to which the nation had indeed done justice to its late Prince. The day had been a great celebration, not just of the Prince, but of sober British moral values. Benjamin Disraeli had no hesitation in his own paean to the late Consort: ‘With Prince Albert we have buried our sovereign,’ he confided unequivocally to Count Vitzthum, Saxon envoy to the Court of St James’s. ‘This German prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown.

The courage needed to face up to her lonely task as monarch had, meanwhile, totally deserted her; her relationship with Albert had been crucial to her own sense of self and the way she lived her life, and without him she was rudderless. Indeed, her whole life had been one long pattern of reliance on others: during her childhood she had become used to incessant surveillance, imposed by her mother. She had never had to stand and act alone until the first months of her reign, after which she had quickly let go of her early promise as an active queen, to accept the guidance of a powerful man – her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Then Albert had come along and, as she was sidelined by pregnancy after pregnancy, he had assumed many of the onerous responsibilities of state on her behalf. However, it went against the grain for Victoria not to fulfil her role conscientiously, as he had so assiduously trained her, but alone as she now was, she was so mistrustful of her own judgement that it was much easier simply to give way to grief and do nothing.

6Having lived her life in a unique position of power as a woman – enacting, initiating, granting permission and, when she chose, withholding it – Victoria was presented by Albert’s death for the first time with something totally outside her control. She felt angry, worthless, inadequate and guilty too: that perhaps in her own self-obsession she had omitted to take her husband’s failing health seriously enough and might even, somehow, have done something to prevent it. Unending grief was therefore not just an escape from responsibilities she did not wish to shoulder alone, but also a necessary form of harsh self-punishment.