Search Results

“... of fifty essays of unequal length on subjects united only by having interested their author. Nisbet’s format is, as they say, the very spit of Voltaire’s. It is suitable only for les plus belles of belles-lettres, for no literary form could show up a second-rate mind more quickly or display to better advantage a mind such as ...”

“... through the diseased consciousness of our selves as beings awash in limitless oceans of time. Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress is a bewilderingly awful book. But it certainly does offer us a distorting mirror of a kind. Nisbet is a conservative American sociologist of some prominence (the Albert ...”

“... immersed in Homer, the other in the Georgics, Eclogues and Aeneid. If the turn of spirit in, say, Robert Graves and Saint-Jean Perse is radically Homeric, that in T.S. Eliot and Valéry is unmistakably Virgilian. The equations become non-linear, as it were, by virtue of the several presences of Dante. Recalling early childhood, Proust sees himself trailing ...”

“... 22/1 BC) belong to the correspondence of two army trumpeters. But on 11 March 1978 the excavator, Robert Anderson, found himself looking at something quite different: five tattered scraps, with elegant Latin capitals. Individual words stood out: CAESAR was interesting. LYCOAL was sensational. Only one Lycoris occurs in Latin literature: she was the ...”