Whatever hope is yours, was my life also;
I went hunting wild/ After the wildest beauty in the world...
—Benjamin Britten, The War Requiem (1962)
The Century begins and ends with the third movement of the Eighth Symphony under...
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
...
Lorenzo ‘Il Magnifico‘, on his death bed, turned his face away from Savonarola to look outside at his City as the priest exhorted him to repent of Florence. The prince refused to answer, gazed at the Duomo, sighed...
"Listen to me, Mr. Ambassador, F--- your parliament and your constitution.... If your prime minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitution, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long" ...
If, on your next trip to Vienna, you set out to understand the personality of this lovely world-capital-that-is-not-a-city, there are three must-sees during your time here that will give you the proper sense of a Durrellian spirit of...
Oh! What a Revolution! And what a heart I must have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!
—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
On the 20th...
Sir John Carew Eccles
"The Nature of Man is the ultimate quest of Science." —Sir John Carew Eccles
"Let us kill Mind!" Otto Neurath declared in 1921. Such was the mental death...
"Abbey in an Oak Forest," by Caspar David Friedrich (1809-1810)
Deep roots are untouched by frost. —J.R.R Tolkien
It has been said that the Germanic soul and the...
“Le grand absent—c'est l'Empire"
C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire
Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To do so is to reclaim, at last, the meaning of an empire that...
