Showing posts with label reaction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reaction. Show all posts

Sunday, 17 September 2023

Salazar, an economist who had for some years lectured at the University of Coimbra, was not only unperturbed at Portugal’s backwardness, but saw it instead as the key to stability – upon being informed that oil had been discovered in Portugal’s Angolan territories he commented merely that this was ‘a pity’ 

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 511

Friday, 21 September 2018

And there was Warne, bowling beautifully with a method thought to have been relegated to the museum

Shortly after lunch on the first day the Edgbaston Test in 1993, Shane Warne was bowing leg-breaks to Alec Stewart, who had momentarily discarded both his helmet and his faded baseball cap in favour of a real, old-fashioned, three lions of England version. As he pushed forward he looked the image of his father at the crease. behind the stumps, there was Ian Healy wearing his baggy cap and air of ageless Australian aggression. And there was Warne, bowling beautifully with a method thought to have been relegated to the museum.

M. Engel, 'Notes by the editor', id. (ed.), Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (1994), 9

Wednesday, 10 January 2018

The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness

In our highly ideological times, even nostalgia has its politics. The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness. The ideologues of the future see attachment to the past as that most awful of all monsters, the agent of reaction. It is to be extracted from the human soul with no quarter or self-pity, for it obstructs the inevitable march of events into the next Utopia. Only certain Eastern European writers, forced to march into the future too often, know the regressive dangers of both forgetfulness and clinging to the past. But then, they are among our world’s experts of mourning, having lost not an archaeological but a living history.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 115

Tuesday, 6 August 2013

Enthusiasm was ill-bred. Enthusiasm was ungentlemanly.

It was Winks who summed up the general impression and put it into a form they all felt was conclusively damning
...

'He's very enthusiastic,' said Winks.

Enthusiasm was ill-bred. Enthusiasm was ungentlemanly. They thought of the Salvation Army wit its braying trumpets and its drums. Enthusiasm meant change. They had goose-flesh when they thought of all the pleasant old habits which stood in imminent danger. They hardly dared to look forward to the future at all.

W. Somerset Maugham, Of human bondage (1925), 65

Friday, 2 August 2013

The modern world ... the last two thousand years — just oughtn’t to have happened.

[I]t tickles me, in 1938, to find someone objecting to having a radio in the house. Porteous was strolling up and down in his usual dreamy way, with his hands in his coat pockets and his pipe between his teeth, and almost instantly he’d begun talking about some law against musical instruments that was passed in Athens in the time of Pericles. It’s always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he’d start telling you about Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never looks at any newspaper except The Times, and takes a pride in telling you that he’s never been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the modern world — and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand years — just oughtn’t to have happened.

G. Orwell, Coming up for Air (1939), 155