Oxford Murders Quotes

Sure didn’t expect to see that kind of assault, here in Oxford,” said another. “Seems like such a quiet town.

She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She felt as safe with him as she'd done with Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear.

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.

The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air—it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were—who knew?

An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone's eyes.

In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.

God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device;

One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: “I don’t know why I am telling you all of this. It’s none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge’s business either. It was a purely family affair.

One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers,” he replied, archly. “I find, however, that you have been looking for them.

No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses. And

All of a sudden his books, which had hitherto been merely a fond decoration and a means of letting his mind free itself from the grim routines of Broadmoor life, had become his most precious possession. For the time being at least he could set aside his imaginings about the harm that people were trying to inflict on him and his person: It was instead his hundreds of books that now needed to be kept safe, and away from the predators with whom he believed the asylum to be infested. His books, and his work on the words he found in them, were about to become the defining feature of his newly chosen life.

He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell.

There is a Sacerdotall dignitie in my native Countrey contiguate to me, where I now contemplate: which your worshipfull benignitie could sone impenetrate for mee, if it would like you to extend your sedules, and collaude me in them to the right honourable lord Chaunceller, or rather Archgrammacian of Englande.

Oxford It is well that there are palaces of peace And discipline and dreaming and desire, Lest we forget our heritage and cease The Spirit’s work—to hunger and aspire: Lest we forget that we were born divine, Now tangled in red battle’s animal net, Murder the work and lust the anodyne, Pains of the beast ‘gainst bestial solace set. But this shall never be: to us remains One city that has nothing of the beast, That was not built for gross, material gains, Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast. We are not wholly brute. To us remains A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams, A place of visions and of loosening chains, A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams. She was not builded out of common stone But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer That she might live, eternally our own, The Spirit’s stronghold—barred against despair.

was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.

Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells. Though

I am a nobody. ... Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.

much older than you knew

Oxford was as drenched in Dixie as we were, just about as Southern a town as you would ever hope to find, which generally was a good thing, because that meant that the weather was nice, except when it was hot enough to fry pork chops on the pavement, and the food was delicious, though it would thicken the walls of your arteries and kill you deader than Stonewall Jackson, and the people were big hearted and friendly, though it was not the hardest place in the world to get murdered for having bad manners. Even our main crop could kill you.

Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known that the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word—cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one—then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary—a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance—and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.

or of oats (“ a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”),

Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.

right…What do you do for a living, Smiley?” “After the war I was at Oxford for a bit. Teaching and research. I’m in London now.” “One of those clever coves, eh?

Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase—when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference”—simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it. Since there was no such phrase until the late seventeenth century, it follows that there was essentially no such concept either, certainly not at the time when Shakespeare was writing—a time when writers were writing furiously, and thinkers thinking as they rarely had before. Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.

And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. “I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.” But

One in a hundred people today suffer from schizophrenia: Nearly all of them, if treated with compassion and good chemistry, can have some kind of dignified life, of a kind that was denied, for much of his time, to Doctor Minor. Except, of course, that Minor had hid dictionary work.

It was an idea consonant with Trench’s underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

These were the soldiers of the Second Brigade—the Irish Brigade—and they were braver and rougher than almost any other unit in the entire Federal army. “When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted,” as one English war correspondent wrote, “the Irish Brigade was called upon.” The

August 25, German forces began an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the “Oxford of Belgium,” a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront not just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, “felt deeply the destruction of Louvain,” according to his friend Colonel House; the president feared “the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.

The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at least it's great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

Marijuana causes paranoia and psychosis. That fact is now beyond dispute. Even scientists who aren’t sure if marijuana can cause permanent psychosis agree that it can cause temporary paranoia and psychotic episodes. The risk is so obvious that marijuana dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to cause paranoia. Paranoia and psychosis cause violence. Overwhelming evidence links psychotic disorders and violence, especially murder. Studies have confirmed the connection, across cultures, nations, races, and eras. The definitive analysis was published in PLOS Medicine in 2009. Led by Seena Fazel, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at Oxford University, researchers examined twenty earlier studies on people with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. They found that people with psychosis were 5 times as likely to commit violent crimes as

The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man. Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.

Afterwards, Robin wondered often if Professor Lovell had seen something in his eyes, a fire he hadn’t known his son possessed, and whether that – his startled realization that his linguistic experiment had developed a will of his own – had prompted Robin in turn to act. He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood.

I know when to stop asking,' she said. 'See, the alethiometer’s like a person, almost. I sort of know when it’s going to be cross or when there’s things it doesn’t want me to know. I kind of feel it. But when you come out of nowhere yesterday, I had to ask it who you were, or I might not have been safe. I had to. And it said …' She lowered her voice even more. 'It said you was a murderer, and I thought, Good, that’s all right, he’s someone I can trust. But I didn’t ask more than that till just now, and if you don’t want me to ask any more, I promise I won’t. This en’t like a private peep show. If I done nothing but spy on people, it’d stop working. I know that as well as I know my own Oxford.' 'You could have asked me instead of that thing. Did it say whether my father was alive or dead?' 'No, because I didn’t ask.' They were both sitting by this time. Will put his head in his hands with weariness. 'Well,' he said finally, 'I suppose we’ll have to trust each other.' 'That’s all right. I trust you.' Will nodded grimly. He was so tired, and there was not the slightest possibility of sleep in this world. Lyra wasn’t usually so perceptive, but something in his manner made her think: He’s afraid, but he’s mastering his fear, like Iorek Byrnison said we had to do; like I did by the fish house at the frozen lake. 'And, Will,' she added, 'I won’t give you away, not to anyone. I promise.' 'Good.' 'I done that before. I betrayed someone. And it was the worst thing I ever did. I thought I was saving his life actually, only I was taking him right to the most dangerous place there could be. I hated myself for that, for being so stupid. So I’ll try very hard not to be careless or forget and betray you.

The failure of the Crusades intensified anti-Jewish persecutions in Europe. Banned from owning land or joining trading companies, forced to wear special clothing, Jews were often involved in moneylending, supposedly taboo for Christians. Kings borrowed money from them, and so protected them, but whenever society was strained, by recession or plague, they were attacked. In 1144, after a boy was murdered in Norwich, England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children to make Passover matzoh, unleashing the ‘blood libel’ which in various forms – but always featuring a conspiracy of Jews to harm non-Jews – reverberates down to the twenty-first century. It spread: in 1171, it hit Blois, France, where thirty-three Jews (seventeen women) were burned alive. In the failed state of England, where Henry III struggled to maintain royal power in the face of endemic noble revolt, both king and rebels borrowed from a wealthy banker, David of Oxford. After David’s death, his widow Licoricia of Winchester, the richest non-noble in England, lent to both sides, partly funding the building of Westminster Abbey. But her murder in 1277 showed the perils of being a prominent Jew. In 1290, Henry’s son Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yet in 1264 Bolesław, duke of Poland, had granted the Statute of Kalisz which gave Jews the right to trade and worship freely and banned the blood libel, legislating against Christian conspiracy theories and denunciations: ‘Accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood is expressly prohibited,’ declared the Statute. ‘If, despite this, a Jew should be accused of murdering a Christian child, such charge must be sustained by testimony of three Christians and three Jews.’ Poland would be a Jewish sanctuary for many centuries.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

In the English language, the word “sadism” only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn’t until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) In that sense, “sadism” is like “serial killer”: a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

British people were supposed to be reserved, but apparently if you added a dog to the mix, reserve went straight out the window.

Marianne Faithful

amity

I propose that an area of no more than 300 square miles, centered roughly upon Henley-on-Thames, has made this quintessentially British town Britain's 'small town and village murder capital'.

William Faulkner. A native of Oxford in Lafayette County, Faulkner argued in a September 9 UPI editorial written from Rome, Italy, that the Till murder was not just a local issue. The consequences were so wide that even the survival of America was at stake. Because the white race totaled only one-fourth of the world’s population, he argued, the rest of the world would not tolerate white America’s abuses of its minorities any longer. Would the United States survive another attack like Pearl Harbor if people throughout the world, who differ from its majority, either in skin color or ideology, were aligned against it? Talk about freedom means nothing if it does not include all of humanity, wrote Faulkner impassionedly. His conclusion was powerful and frank: Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.

Hillary thought. Someone get me

Oxford

Perhaps my one wholly legitimate claim to notoriety is that single-handedly I have made Oxford the murder capital of the UK—and probably of the EU.

rose

chance

 I used to have picnics on Wimbledon Common and I never knew this place for anything else but strawberries and cream, tennis and Rachel Nickell’s murder! Now Wimbledon in my mind is tied with mysterious sexy intrigue, not just fruit, police honey traps and a wrongly accused killer! I shall visit the Village for coffee. Please say hi if you spot paparazzi moi with my cam. Allergies disclaimer: I would like to stress that this book is not exactly for the unwashed masses: I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment. Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash?   He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling. My perfume was weak; hers much stronger. I say, my temper flaring. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual hoi polloi quality potential chattel chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get them into the lady’s knickers. Nope, she’s allergic to stupid.. A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash but a moron makes her skin crawl. This is a cleverly written book. So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy! Just saying! In words of our hero: *‘Bloody pricey,’ Adam adds. ‘But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it?’ [...] then squirts onto my wrist playfully.

For some reason, never quite explained, Furnivall had not the ginger to keep the hundreds of volunteers enthused, and so, slowly and steadily, they simply stopped reading, stopped sending in the slips.

Then in 1979 a flurry of low blows began to unfold when the Flower was restored by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Ashmolean owns no notes regarding their conservation work on the Flower—nor do the portrait’s current owners at the Royal Shakespeare Company. All we know for sure is that this restoration changed the Flower in ways unimaginable.

In his article, Barrell had cited a letter by Ketel’s biographer that proved Ketel had indeed painted de Vere. Barrell then pointed out that the Ashbourne had likely resided for decades at Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire, where a 1695 will mentioned a portrait of “the earl of Oxford my wife’s great grand-father at [full] length.” In 1721 that de Vere portrait was again noted by the antiquarian George Vertue, but by 1782 this framed picture had vanished; yet that year’s inventory recorded a new portrait now hung in the main dining hall: an unframed three-quarter-length Will Shakespeare. De Vere full-length with frame disappears, Shakespeare three-quarter-length unframed appears, and all this taking place some thirty-five miles from where the Ashbourne would be discovered. It was hard to fault Barrell’s logic here, I felt, especially since the Folger itself had recorded the Ashbourne as owning no original edges, meaning the picture had been cut down in size at some point.

Chapter 3: The madness of war (page 47) (A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later. He moved to the American West, first as doctor to the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, then to the newly acquired Alaskan Territory to collect specimens of Artic habitations, and finally on to Port Townsend and Seattle, where he was elected mayor. In 1889, still holding the post, he took off on a canoe expedition to Whidbey Island with a friend, G. Morris Haller. Neither man ever returned. Neither boats nor bodies were ever found. A Minor street and a Thomas T. Minor School remain, as well as a reputation in Seattle that equates the name of Minor with some degree of glamour, pioneering, and mystery.)

Mabel was the leader of a group of senior ladies, known affectionately as the “Old Biddies”, who ruled the village of Meadowford-on-Smythe with a meddling fist and prying nose. Like many retired pensioners, Mabel and her three friends—Glenda, Florence, and Ethel—had time on their hands and energy to spare. The problem was, instead of directing it towards knitting, gardening, and grandchildren, the Old Biddies seemed to have developed an unhealthy interest in crime. When they weren’t reading Agatha Christie novels, they were busy trying to re-enact one, and their meddling in recent murder cases had already given local police a big headache.

I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident.”   Although

They were a formidable group—the college dean, Henry Liddell (whose daughter Alice had so captivated the Christ Church mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson that he wrote an adventure book for her, set in Wonderland);

The first slips of snow white unlined paper, six inches by four, and covered with William Minor’s neat, elaborately cursive, and so distinctively American handwriting in greenish black ink, began to drift out from the Broadmoor post room in the spring of 1885.

It was a dispute of such gravity—linguists and philologists were known to be mercurial and hold eternal grudges—that

Achaemenid Persian

I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest-staying inmates. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.

The words, mumbled in a growly voice, are hard to understand. “Interrupting me… how dare she… right in the middle of dinner prep… won’t be on my shoulders

was a strange political system that led to Hilary representing Liverpool, while the Liberal Party’s current leader in the House, William Gladstone, had grown up in Liverpool but for a long time represented Oxford, of all places. Still, he also believed that his

mollified.

compos mentis.

salutary

in situ.

On the highest mountains on the planet, where every additional ounce might determine the difference between victory and defeat, they brought along dog-eared copies of Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in their rucksacks. Two thousand feet below the summit of Mount Everest, inside a tiny tent pitched along a murderous ridge, a British climber named Eric Shipton tried to read, by flickering candlelight, Thorton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey , a novel which questioned the meaning of life in the face of the sudden and deadly collapse of an ancient rope bridge in eighteenth century Peru.

Even though Sam wasn't a romance author, he knew all the big ones, the heavy hitters and those that had crossed genres. He was greeted by most of the authors, some he knew and others who wanted to meet the famous author. Needless to say the romance genre remained comprised mostly by women authors. Sam stuck out like a rooster in a hen house. A tall, handsome, cool rooster in black jeans, his sunglasses hooked off the pocket of his pale blue oxford shirt. A rooster with a flock of hens following his every move.

One might think that after this trenchant diagnosis of the radical dualism in human thinking, Huxley would urge us to take truth seriously and lean against any way in which we may be tempted to rationalize our needs—as Plato and Aristotle would have recommended. Instead, bizarrely, he goes on to take the very approach he was attacking. He freely admits that he “took it for granted” that the world had no meaning, but he did not discover it, he decided it. “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.”7 His philosophy of meaninglessness was far from disinterested. And the reason? “We objected to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”8 This admission is extraordinary. To be sure, Huxley and his fellow members of the Garsington Circle near Oxford were not like the Marquis de Sade, who used the philosophy of meaninglessness to justify cruelty, rape and murder. But Huxley’s logic is no different. He too reached his view of the world for nonintellectual reasons: “It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence.” After all, he continues in this public confessional, “The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants, or why his friends should seize political power and govern in a way they find most advantageous to themselves.”9 The eminent contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel is equally candid. He admits that his deepest objection to Christian faith stems not from philosophy but fear. I am talking about something much deeper—namely the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.10 At least there is no pretense in such confessions. As Pascal wrote long ago, “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”11 In Huxley’s case there is no clearer confession of what Ludwig Feuerbach called “projection,” Friedrich Nietzsche called the “will to power,” Sigmund Freud called “rationalization,” Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” and the sociologists of knowledge call “ideology”—a set of intellectual ideas that serve as social weapons for his and his friends’ interests. Unwittingly, this scion of the Enlightenment pleads guilty on every count, but rather than viewing it as a confession, Huxley trumpets his position proudly as a manifesto. “For myself, no doubt, as for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.”12 Truth

You don't know the first thing about it,' Lil stormed. 'This summer a girl was murdered - and Sophie and I could easily have been very badly hurt ourselves - while you were swanning about at Oxford. I jolly well know this is serious - that's why I'm taking it seriously, and using my brain.

Brian Herbert, still watching from the back of the boat, felt justified in losing him in the first place. See, he could say, I told you he was like an eel. The sod must be as double-jointed as a bloody snake.

DEAD MAN’S WALK Antony James © Antony James 2017 Antony James has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author

pince-nez

maundering.

dogsbody,

harridan

miasma

Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

And there are the girls—young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears—who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.

The original settler in the New World was Thomas Minor, who came originally from the village of Chew Magna in Gloucestershire.

Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind working without a single work of lexicographical reference beside him, other than Mr. Cooper’s crib (which Mrs. Cooper once threw into the fire, prompting the great man to begin all over again) and Mr. Wilson’s little manual, but that was the condition under which his particular genius was compelled to flourish.

In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.

after all the years of waiting, the interested world could at least see the magnificent complexity of the undertaking, the detail, the filigree work, the sheer intricacies of exactitude that the editors were bent on compiling.

worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out.

fully half a century since the first signs of madness had been noticed, back at the Florida army fort. And yet still the symptoms remained the same—persistent, uncured, incurable.

Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men—and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minié ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before: He could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine.

CHAPTER ONE It was a beautiful Sunday evening in mid-March when Hillary Greene turned the corner onto a very familiar part of the Oxford canal. Up ahead, she could just make out the first glimpse of the few rooftops and chimneys that marked the small hamlet of Thrupp, which was less than a mile from Kidlington, in the heart of Oxfordshire’s Thames Valley. She throttled down the engine of the Mollern, her narrowboat and home for more

As a scholar who had been first in his year in Logic and Method at Oxford years ago, he felt humbled to think that all his youthful days of training counted for nothing in a case like this. It concerned people, strange people, and, as his old nurse had often said seventy years ago, ‘there’s nowt queerer than folk.

As it happens, the most fulsome remarks made about the volunteers that night relate to two men who had much in common: Both were Americans, both spent time in India, both were soldiers, both were mad, and though both had been invited, neither one came to the Oxford dinner.

Or, worse, excess fat.

James Hilton, who had himself endured an almost equally amazing mass enthusiasm, referred in a radio talk to Mr. Winton’s admirable “Threenody.” This sent thousands scurrying to the Oxford English Dictionary, and set other thousands writing indignantly to their pet radio editors. Fifty-three per cent of these managed an indirect reference to England’s war debt.

The British evolutionary biologist and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins once said, “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” I have always liked that quote. It reflects the utter lack of bias inherent in DNA evidence. It may not know or care, but when it comes to solving murder cases, it sure can tell us a lot.