Saturday, 24 April 2021

A job at the Sudan Civil Service, for instance, required either a first-class degree, or a Blue plus a second

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Wisden had been among the first to question the true merit of university cricket, removing its traditional list of Oxbridge blues in 1993....
Tuesday, 20 April 2021

It is not possible he can believe that religion to be genuine whose ministers destroy his game

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'I have laid down two rules for the country: first, not to smite the partridge; for if I feed the poor, and comforted the sick, and inst...
Monday, 19 April 2021

In Hindostan, what must be the astonishment of the natives to find that we are forbidden to rob, murder, and steal;

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'Let us ask, too, if the Bible is universally diffused in Hindostan, what must be the astonishment of the natives to find that we are fo...
Sunday, 18 April 2021

He favoured the ideals (but scarcely one of the actions) of the French Revolution

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The general tendency of his sermons was what would then have been called subversive. In other words, he was on the side of humanity against ...
Saturday, 17 April 2021

He hated the frenzies of sectarianism even more than the mummeries of Rome

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Now nothing is more notable about the generous and joyful impatience of Sydney Smith, than the fact that he hated the frenzies of sectariani...
Friday, 16 April 2021

We see the elite of the Thousand-Year Reich a set of flatulent clowns swayed by purely random influences

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This scene, as it is described to us, is perhaps overdrawn; but not improbably. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we have too many ac...

One felt that somehow it would take more than totalitarian war to put an end to cricket

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[H.S. Altham, in 1940] ends by describing a visit to Lord's, sandbags everywhere, the Long Room stripped bare. And yet: "The turf w...