His [Viv Richards] demeanour at such moments has been described as insouciant, but regal might be nearer the mark. The downward curve of the fine nose, the level gaze, the wide expressive mouth within the handsome beard - all combine to indicate that if he ever went after the role of an emperor, the price of the second favourite a the audition would be 33-1 and drifting.
H. McIlvanney, 'Black is beautiful' (1985), R. Guha (ed.), The Picador book of cricket (2001), 202
To young eyes, quickest to perceive the things that make cricket, Miller is as an Olympian god among mortals. He brings boys' dreams to life He is the cricketer they would all like to be, the one who can hit more gloriously and bowl faster than anybody on earth. When Neville Cardus called him a young eagle among crows and daws Miller was not a champion playing out of his class; sharing the field were him were the elect of the world's two greatest cricketing countries, Bradman, Hammond and bearers of other famous names, Compton and other men of personality
Masculine as Tarzan, he plays lustily. Style suffuses his cricket with glowing power, personality charges it with daring and knocks bowling and convention sky-high.
R. Robinson, 'Touch of a Hero' (1951), R. Guha (ed.), The Picador book of cricket (2001), 126
Another factor which contributed to the falling demand [for sherry] was the changing moral attitude towards drink. By the 1880s Victorian smugness and philistinism were reaching their peak; the Salvation Army had been beating its drums for years and saving souls from the torments of alcohol; Dick Turner had long since coined the word 'teetotal' and the exponents of that ghastly creed were preaching misery throughout the land; pious faces could be seen every Sunday leaving tin tabernacles to threaten publicans with eternal damnation. There were, of course, a few of the enlightened, but Saintsbury's influence lay still in the future and G.K. Chesterton was far too young to compose the rimes of The Flying Inn. The naughty nineties were hardly in sight, and when they did come they bright young things only thought of champagne.
J. Jeffs, Sherry (6th edition, 2016), 74
During the regicide disgrace of the Protectorate, sherry suffered a short-lived eclipse but this arose more as a result of matters in Spain than from the change of government in England. During the Civil War and afterwards the nobility, who had been the greatest buyers of wine, could no longer buy it on their accustomed scale. Some were exiled and others impoverished. Although the Puritans detested drunkenness and gluttony, they had no objections to drinking in moderation. The awful heresy of teetotalism was not to emerge for another three hundred years. ... But the beginnings of the Commonwealth coincided with the start of years of terrible plague in Jerez which resulted in the disruption of the wine trade for over two decades.
J. Jeffs, Sherry (6th edition, 2016), 24
All his [Columbus'] efforts, his intrigues with the Church and the monarchy, his triumphs and disappointments, the elaborate preparations for his voyages, the voyages themselves, all were centred on Andalusia. From Andalusia he gathered his forces, and many of the men came from the Sherry towns. He set forth from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on his third journey, to discover the island of Trinidad in 1498, and Sanlúcar was soon established as a major port for the new American trade; it was the port from which Pizzaro set sail twenty-five years later on his way to conquer Peru. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who discovered Florida, was the son of a Jerez wine grower.
J. Jeffs, Sherry (6th edition, 2016), 12
In the book Lord Clark, as he became, described his life (1903-1983) as 'one long, harmless confidence trick', a reference to what he called his freak aptitude, apparent from the age of 9 or 10, for responding authoritatively to works of art.
He profited from this, he told me, because most English people didn't 'give a blow about art' and considered it sissy. So when they met someone who could speak with confidence and enthusiasm about paintings and sculpture, they were prepared to listen - 'to save themselves trouble'.
M. Barber, 'Not your typical courtier', Slightly Foxed 77 (2023), 81
Alexander the Great needed four months to capture Multan in 325 BCE, and was hit by an arrow that nearly killed him. It took Ben Stokes three and a half days, despite a touch of flu. By presiding over victory in perhaps the region's most ancient city, he achieved what no cricketing general from English shores ever had - a second successive Test win in Pakistan, and the chance of a whitewash.
D. Wilson, 'Pakistan v England: second test', L. Booth (ed.), Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (2023), 411
Cricket's popularity spread to schools across the country until, by the end of the 2010s, it was a staple of many PE classes. Why does Hardeep think it struck such a chord? "In part, it's because cricket is a sport that can be played by boys and girls together up to a certain age. In part it's because you can play it on a football pitch. Mostly, though, I think it's because Ukraine is always interested in ideas that help it to identify with cultures that aren't Russian. Cricket helps connect Ukraine to India, Pakistan, Australia, England..."
A. Preston, 'Anything but Russia', L. Booth (ed.), Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (2023), 49
But why should any of this matter? Is it not merely what my friends are pleased to call 'font fetishism'? Does all this talk of kerning and the Golden Section not reek of pretension? I don't think so. For although typography considers written words as aesthetic entities in their own right, it does not forget that they are first and foremost the servants of sense. The ultimate purpose of typography is to make reading as pleasant as might be, sparing the reader discomfort and distraction, and thereby freeing that reader's energy and intellect to attend to what the words mean. Good typography is the glass lamp that shields the candle of civilization, that its light may shine through steady and clear.
M. Fisher, 'Philosophical designs', Slightly Foxed 75 (2022), 62
You knew what you loved and what you hated and what you did, what actions, what side you had chosen. You could not, for instance, work with the colonists in supressing the people and still say you loved the people. You could not stand on the fence in a struggle and say you were on the side of those fighting the evil. Her father had wanted to make money and to accumulate property: he had chosen neutrality, and he had hated any suggestion of being involved on the side of the people in case this ruined his chances of making money. The tragedy of her father, who by his neutrality had therefore chosen the side of the colonists, was that despite his selling out, despite his denial of self and of his father, he had ended up ruined anyway, the world disintegrating around him.
N. wa Thiong'o, Petals of blood (1977), 399
Some were taken to work on European farms while the white man went to war. Imagine that: taken to keep the white man's shambas alive while theirs fell into neglect and waste! For a woman alone can never do all the work on the farm. How could she grow sugar cane, yams, sweet potatoes which used to be man's domain.
N. wa Thiong'o, Petals of blood (1977), 254
During precolonial times, and hence not so long ago, more than ten thousand little states, kingdoms, ethnic unions, and federations existed in Africa. Roland Oliver, a historian at the University of London, draws attention to a general paradox in his book, The African Experience (1991): it has become common parlance to say that European colonialists partitioned Africa. Partitioned? Oliver marvels. Colonialism was a brutal unification, brought about by fire and sword! Ten thousand entities were reduced to fifty.
R. Kapuściński, tr. K. Glowczewska, The shadow of the sun (1998), 323
