Warwickshire Quotes

... He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it.

I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important. I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax. I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the stars. If we’d been on that dark road in Warwickshire we might have seen more, but those we could see were like the whole galaxy to me. They made the world seem big again.

the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.

Warwickshire is the Monarch of all Shires

There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady.  Should never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player, but still, it showed imagination.  His wife was really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. 

In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare’s, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot.

The news that she had gone of course now spread rapidly, and by lunch time Riseholme had made up its mind what to do, and that was hermetically to close its lips for ever on the subject of Lucia. You might think what you pleased, for it was a free country, but silence was best. But this counsel of perfection was not easy to practice next day when the evening paper came. There, for all the world to read were two quite long paragraphs, in "Five o'clock Chit-Chat," over the renowned signature of Hermione, entirely about Lucia and 25 Brompton Square, and there for all the world to see was the reproduction of one of her most elegant photographs, in which she gazed dreamily outwards and a little upwards, with her fingers still pressed on the last chord of (probably) the Moonlight Sonata. . . . She had come up, so Hermione told countless readers, from her Elizabethan country seat at Riseholme (where she was a neighbour of Miss Olga Bracely) and was settling for the season in the beautiful little house in Brompton Square, which was the freehold property of her husband, and had just come to him on the death of his aunt. It was a veritable treasure house of exquisite furniture, with a charming music-room where Lucia had given Hermione a cup of tea from her marvellous Worcester tea service. . . . (At this point Daisy, whose hands were trembling with passion, exclaimed in a loud and injured voice, "The very day she arrived!") Mrs. Lucas (one of the Warwickshire Smythes by birth) was, as all the world knew, a most accomplished musician and Shakespearean scholar, and had made Riseholme a centre of culture and art. But nobody would suspect the blue stocking in the brilliant, beautiful and witty hostess whose presence would lend an added gaiety to the London season.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust,” which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.

ninety POWs from the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment were executed by grenade and rifle-fire by the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment in a crowded barn at Wormhout, near the Franco-Belgian border.39 On seeing two grenades tossed into the crowded barn, Sergeant Stanley Moore and Sergeant-Major Augustus Jennings leapt on top of them to shield their men from the blasts. These despicable, cold-blooded massacres give lie to the myth that it was desperation and fear of defeat towards the end of the war that led the SS to kill Allied POWs who had surrendered; in fact such inhumanity was there all along, even when Germany was on the eve of her greatest victory. Although the officer responsible for Le Paradis, Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Fritz Knochlein, was executed in 1949, Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke, who commanded the unit that carried out the Wormhout atrocity, was never punished for this war crime and died in 2001 in a Hamburg retirement home.

Tolkien had sent him a poem called “Kortirion Among the Trees”. Kortirion represented Warwick in the early stages of Tolkien’s mythology, and was the chief town, complete with tower, in a region of elms (Warwickshire) on the Lonely Island (England).

I am Hansje, born and bred in the north Netherlands where I bathed from age one in lakes, river and cold-water outdoor pools. Here in Warwickshire, where I have lived for some thirty-three years, I am among other things a swimmer, and if you ever wish to swim in the beautiful Avon, then do tell me and I will show you to the best and secret places. I have never experienced the profound sense of loss of someone I have never met as when I learnt that Roger had died. Many sentences in each of his books are as if engraved in me, find a resting place, a recognition, they are magnifying glass, lens and microscope to the natural world, a watery surface through which I look to see the earth clarified.

The man had managed to find her a corsage in the middle of rural Warwickshire during a war.

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In 1843 the publisher Charles Knight provided the nation with the first book-length biography of the national poet, William Shakspere: A Biography. (Nineteenth-century biographers tended to use “Shakspere,” consistent with the spelling on his baptismal and burial records.) The book was an extended Victorian fantasy—a “descriptive reverie,” as one critic at the time put it—freely fictionalizing Shakespeare’s life, blissfully untethered from scholarly citation or historical fact. Since Shakespeare could not be known through letters, journals, or other personal records, Knight found him in Stratford-upon-Avon—in the streets and village life, the surrounding fields and forests, and in the Birthplace itself. Stratford filled in the gaps—indeed, became Shakespeare’s biography. The Warwickshire countryside elucidated his love of nature; the half-timbered house on Henley Street, his idyllic childhood.

that this genius transcended was his humble origins, which Oxfordians would deprive us of. And so, the Oxfordian position doesn’t just ‘solve the mystery’ of Shakespeare’s accomplishment, doesn’t just demystify the man, it deprives the Shakespeare community of its primary source of power…. In less hyperbolic terms, anti-Stratfordians spoil the fun. They provide an answer to a question that we don’t want answered. They provide the final pieces to a puzzle we’d prefer to keep on solving. How did a young man from the depths of Warwickshire scale the heights of literary fame, armed with nothing more than a grammar school education? Well, he didn’t. Instead, an extremely well-educated, well-off, well-traveled, and well-connected young aristocrat wrote the plays.

that this genius transcended was his humble origins, which Oxfordians would deprive us of. And so, the Oxfordian position doesn’t just ‘solve the mystery’ of Shakespeare’s accomplishment, doesn’t just demystify the man, it deprives the Shakespeare community of its primary source of power…. In less hyperbolic terms, anti-Stratfordians spoil the fun. They provide an answer to a question that we don’t want answered. They provide the final pieces to a puzzle we’d prefer to keep on solving. How did a young man from the depths of Warwickshire scale the heights of literary fame, armed with nothing more than a grammar school education? Well, he didn’t. Instead, an extremely well-educated, well-off, well-traveled, and well-connected young aristocrat wrote the plays. His well-documented life explains everything, in fact, and in so doing leaves little room for speculation.

A Warwickshire priest, John Rous, writing a history of England at the end of the fifteenth century, chronicled the ruthless large-scale destruction inflicted on the North by William the Conqueror (see chapter 14), and asked what now should be said of the ‘modern’ destruction of villages. ‘The root of this evil’, he said, ‘is greed. The plague of avarice infects these times and it blinds men. They are not the sons of God, but of Mammon’.

A young man married is a man that’s marred.’ That’s a golden rule, Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested it; experience is the sole abestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it before one’s hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the ignorant, rosy-cheeked, Warwickshire peasant girl, at eighteen! Poor fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of poetry within him, tinging all the common realities of life with its rose hue; genius giving him power to see with God-like vision, the ‘fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices,’ and the golden gleam of Cleopatra’s sails; to feel the ‘spiced Indian air’ by night, and the wild working of kings’ ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and passions of a world from which social position shut him out!

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels’. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had ‘an unhinging and mesmeric effect’ upon his mind.

Forrest was well satisfied with their progress. At their present rate of speed, they would reach Gretna Green well before dark. He was less satisfied with his handling of Ellie, however. She would not allow him to put her off much longer, he knew. The truth was, after coming so close to ruining his happiness once, he wished to be secure of her before taking any more chances. Once across the border, he could simply declare her his wife before witnesses and have no further fears of her escaping him. It was underhanded, even cowardly, he admitted, but it was also nearly foolproof. He recalled what Ellie had said about leaving for Ireland and was doubly grateful to Sir George for his timing. If he had waited until even the next day to follow Ellie to Warwickshire, she might already have been gone! No, he would play it safe this time. Once she was wedded to him he would have ample time to court her properly. Besides, he did not think she was indifferent to him, in spite of her present —and justifiable —irritation. He chafed for the moment when he could have her all to himself, to hold her, to... He urged the horses faster.