Something completely different

 I have decided to recycle some old research. The result is a new blog called salient quotations. You will find the entries here: https://salientquotations.blogspot.com/2026/03/introduction.html

And here is a taste: I came across the Radulph quote below while reading Norwich on a bus. Must share that, I thought,  but then I realised I had filed it before, and went looking for it.

Here is a sample of what I found, including the Radulph one. The topic is critics, and before you comment, my filing cabinet drawers are all labelled Miscellaneous A - Z.

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic.
— Jan Sibelius (1865 – 1957) (attrib.)

 

[Kierkegaard] might be described as a loose-limbed Nordic Pascal (with the mathematical genius left out), born into the Romantic Age in a small country.
— J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 146.

 

Kierkegaard is very queer, I think. I read some selections in German last year, and a French translation … a very odd and good book.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Edward Sackville-West, 1932, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 356.

 

[Macaulay] has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)

 

Thou should’st be living at this hour,
Milton, and enjoying power.
England hath need of thee and not
Of Leavis and of Eliot.
— Heathcote William Garrod.

 

You ought to be roasted alive, not that even well-cooked you would be to my taste.
— J. M. Barrie, to George Bernard Shaw, in response to GBS’s criticism of his plays.

 

In his variations on the Paganini theme, Brahms is commenting subtly on physics and dynamics, including light-hearted references to Boyle’s Law and Fletcher’s Trolley.
— Basil Boothroyd (1910 – 1988), quoted by Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.

 

A good deal of Teilhard is nonsense, but on further reflection I can see it as a dotty, euphoristic kind of nonsense, very greatly preferable to solemn long-faced Germanic nonsense. There is no real harm in it. But what, I wonder, was the origin of the philosophically self-destructive belief that obscurity makes a prima-facie case for profundity? — the origin, I mean, of the comically fallacious syllogism that runs Profound reasoning is difficult to understand; this work is difficult to understand; therefore this work is profound.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 21.

 

The harm Kant unwittingly did to philosophy was to make obscurity seem respectable. From Kant on, any petty metaphysician might hope to be given credit for profundity if what he said was almost impossible to follow.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 22.

 

Schopenhauer: A German; very deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses (1910)

 

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘On His Books’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 413.

 

De la Beche is a DIRTY DOG,— THERE IS PLAIN English & there is no mincing the matter. I knew him to be a thorough jobber & a great intriguer & we have proved him to be thoroughly incompetent to carry on the survey … He writes in one style to you and in another to me … I confess that a very little matter would prevent my having further intercourses with De la B. If I can trace to him the origin of those falsehoods he shall smart.
— Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792 – 1871), quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Conspiracy, University of Chicago 1985, 194.

 

It would have been more accurate for Leavis to say that there has been no debate between him and me. There has not: nor will there be. For one simple and over-riding reason. I can’t trust him to keep to the ground-rules of academic or intellectual controversy.
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case, 1970.

 

Victor Hugo was really a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.
— Anon., quoted by J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 132.

 

Born in Warsaw in 1838 and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allan of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, 64.

 

…one, the notoriously unreliable monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only by that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled from more monasteries than any other littérateur of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the South, 1016–1130, 1992.

 

Andrade is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959), recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.

 

The hatchet is buried for the present: but the handle is conveniently near the surface.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959) on Lord Cherwell, recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.

 

I have no doubt of your courage, Sir Robert, though you have of mine; but then consider what different lives we have led, and what a school of courage is that troop of Yeomanry at Tamworth — the Tory fencibles! Who can doubt of your courage who has seen you at their head, marching up Pitt Street through Dundas Square onto Liverpool Lane? … the very horses looking at you as if you were going to take away 3 per cent. of their oats. After such spectacles as these, the account you give of your own courage cannot be doubted …
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845), in a letter to Sir Robert Peel, June 20, 1842, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 400

 

Mr Henry James has written a book called The Secret of Swedenborg and has kept it.
— William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920).

 

In retrospect I think my essay on Teilhard was good of its kind, but I confess that when on the insistence of an American writer friend I read Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences’ I bowed my head in the presence of a master of literary criticism.
— Sir Peter Medawar (1915 – 1987), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 22.

 

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), quoted in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, a Memoir, 1920.

 

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
— (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859), ‘Rondeau’. (Jenny was Mrs. Carlyle)

 

LORD DARLINGTON: I can resist everything except temptation.
— Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900), Lady Windermere’s Fan.

 

Diary of a project

 Or, I am going dotty.

Some of my older friends know that I used to do stipple doodles. Some of my former colleagues know that I used to do such doodles in planning meetings, where the evolving shapes kept stupid idiot drones mesmerised, so the intelligent ones could get on with decision making.

The one above later became the Dangerous Goldfish in my revised Monster Maintenance Manual. (You can see a sample of the ebook here.) (And the paperback version is here.)

Others were done at home, like my take on a work by Mussorgsky. At the time, my ears were stopped up with steppe, and so I did not quite depict A Night on Bare Mountain with reliable accuracy, but caveat emptor and all that, what you see is what you get, that and no more.

Anyhow, as I have decided to stop writing books, I have bought some new fine point pens, and gone back to stippling.

Here is my first subject, a Roman aqueduct in Segovia in Spain, a name which until then I had associated with incredibly virtuosic guitar playing.

And here is the start of play.

I think this will keep me off the streets for a few weeks.

Let it not be said, however, that I draw the line with this: there is just one rule: dots only!

Now, to see how much further I have to go, take a look at the work of this Ukrainian artist, beside whom, I am a mere doodler. (I note that he calls his work doodles as well, but seriously, his work is totally amazing.

This stipple style lets you mess with texture, and a close look at the original shows that all of the stone is the same. I cannot easily reflect the unevenness of the stone, so I have changed some of the rock to darker stone.

Here is stage 2.

And here is Stage 3, almost there, and something interesting here: I copied stage 2 with the camera, and stage 3 with the printer-scanner.

I am not entirely happy with the bleed there...

So I did a scan at 1200 dpi and grey scale. As a first effort, I will leave it there. I rushed this one a bit, and I chose a tricky subject, so a more careful choice, slower planning, and less rush in the execution.

That said, the first effort was AWFUL. All the same, dunno if I should stay with wildlife... or this sculpture found in Oslo in Norway

I Aten't Dead Yet

 I have been unwontedly silent for a bit, getting what is definitely going to be the last book ever  sorted. Currently called Fables, Fibs and Folklore: Tales My Mother Taught Me *, it is about all those things people believe and should not believe, like the cherished belief that before Columbus, people were scared of falling off the edge

It is a collection of essays is about ‘well-known facts’ which only the experts will tell you are untrue. Once, everybody believed the Moon was made of green cheese, they all knew that a full Moon led to mental instability, and we were unanimous about the canals on Mars. These days, there are probably few believers for any of those claims, but some of my American friends learned in school that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and had wooden teeth. They also remain absolutely convinced that southern hemisphere sinks and toilets drain in the opposite direction, because they have seen (faked) ‘demonstrations’ across the equator, done by showmen. All nations have myths like that…

All of those are false, but only the plugholes and teeth appear here, because the real dentures and drains involve interesting science. So I discuss those two items; the self-designated Lunatics who really met in Birmingham each full moon, and 144 other ‘well-known’ facts or beliefs before dismissing almost all of them. Some other points like the impossibility of Nero throwing Christians to the lions, or of Vikings wearing horned helmets, or of Julius Caesar being born by Caesarean section lack a place here because they aren’t as interesting enough. Instead, this is a refuting of the partial-history-of-147-mainly-wrong-ideas, which were all believed at some stage, although thanks to lazy journalists, dodgy authors, and poor teachers, some of them remain current. Where the truth goes down a rabbit-hole, I chase after it, dragging my readers along so we can share the scraps of truth that survive.

* but really should not have taught me.

Anyhow, here is a taste:

You cannot add one hundred numbers in 10 seconds

Yes you can, if they are the first hundred integers, and I will not tell you how it is done, but the solution is credited to Carl Friedrich Gauss, and the answer is 5050. These days, with the internet, that is all you need.

The class to whom I introduced this are probably already grandparents now, and I learned recently that some of them still recall the sneaky way I introduced this at the end of an entertaining maths lesson where I, as a science teacher, was covering an ‘extra’. These were Year 9s, and all teachers know how hard kids of that age are to set on fire, but I told them how, if they cubed a number between 100 and 200 on their calculator and gave me the value, I could give them the cube root.

I then showed them how the last digit of the cube gave me the last digit of the root, and left them to work out the ranges for each decade of roots. A few of them got this, and they were well warmed before I started, a calculated one minute before the bell, a tale about Gauss, a lazy teacher, and the sum of the first hundred integers. As planned, before I could spill the beans on Gauss’ solution, the bell went. It was now recess, and I told them I had to rush, as I was on playground duty.

They were hooked, and I headed out with a dozen boys and girls in close company, all wanting a solution. No, I told them, I was done with teaching maths for the day, but I would answer questions. By the end of the recess, they had elicited the solution from my sternly yes-and-no answers (with a couple of judicious hints), and when I said “Of course, Gauss never went on to add the first two hundred numbers, but he could have done…”, one girl immediately raised her hand (unnecessary in an informal chat, but she was on my wavelength) “The answer would be 20,100…”

I nodded, and several voices cried: “That’s 201 times 100”. The bell rang, and I beat a hasty retreat to the staff room. Perhaps I had made the way easier by telling them at the start about the bumble bee that could not fly, and then taking them through Zeno’s paradox (you will meet both of these in chapter 3, and then you will understand). Nothing is impossible: you just need to think: if nothing else that day, they got that idea.