Sedulia's Quotations

Saki: No one can effectively defend a sitting government

No one can effectively defend a Government when it’s been in office several years.

  -- Saki (H.H. Munro) (1870-1916) in The Unbearable Bassington (pub. 1912).

Stephen Robinson: All the gold on earth could fit in 20 cubic metres

The Mercedes-Benz Luton van can carry a volume of up to 20 cubic metres

All the gold that has ever been mined-- some 166,000 [metric] tonnes of it-- could fit into a crate measuring 20 cubic metres [706.29333443 cubic feet].... and the other thing about gold is that almost all of the metal that has been mined still exists... So if you hold a piece of gold in your hand, chances that it was once smelted by the Incas, or was part of a buckle on a Roman centurion's sword melted down after the collapse of the Roman empire....

     --Stephen Robinson, quoting Tony Dobra, a director of Baird & Co., gold dealer and smelter in the U.K., in "How to keep your money safe and make even more of it*), in Tatler, November 2011

*probably

Robert Byron on Iraq, 1933

It is little solace to recall that Mesopotamia was once so rich, so fertile of art and invention, so hospitable to the Sumerians, the Seleucids, and the Sasanids. The prime fact of Mesopotamian history is that in the thirteenth century Hulagu destroyed the irrigation system; and that from that day to this Mesopotamia has remained a land of mud deprived of mud's only possible advantage, vegetable fertility. It is a mud plain, so flat that a single heron, reposing on one leg beside some rare trickle of water in a ditch, looks as tall as a wireless aerial. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-coloured; they wear mud-coloured clothes, and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie. Baghdad is the capital one would expect of this divinely favoured land. It lurks in a mud fog; when the temperature drops below 110 [ºF], the residents complain of the chill and get out their furs. For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal, and leaves a scar.

  --Robert Byron (1905-1941), The Road to Oxiana (pub. 1937)

Lockerbie: Diplomat's wife hears a different story

Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people, including 11 on the ground

A curious thing happened in the Gambia which I have often thought about since. Very soon after the Lockerbie disaster, an ex-Interpol detective came to dinner with us. He was in the Gambia investigating some kind of fisheries fraud for the EU. Over the meal we discussed Lockerbie and he said, "Oh it will all come out soon. That plane was carrying drugs to the US as part of a deal over the American hostages in Lebanon." He went on to tell us that in order for the drugs to get through unimpeded it was arranged that the cargo if the Pan Am plane would not be inspected. What happened then, he said, was that, via the Lebanese/Hezbollah/Iran connection, the extraordinary fact that the plane's cargo would travel unchecked, came to the ears of Iranians seeking revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US not long before; somehow they arranged to put a bomb on board.

Though the detective said that this story would be all over the papers in the following months, it never was. I have told it to every journalist I know, but no paper has ever taken it up-- although there was a book published years ago called The Octopus Trail, which told more or less the same tale. Last year, not long before he died, I happened to tell Paul Foot the story and he urged me not to let it lie-- which is why I am putting it into this book.

       --Brigid Keenan (1939- ), Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005)

Edward Gibbons on the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Jews

The conquest of the land of Canaan was accompanied with so many wonderful and with so many bloody circumstances, that the victorious Jews were left in a state of irreconcilable hostility with all their neighbors.

--Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (pub. 1766-88)

Two versions of the Flight of the Earls

On September 4, 1607, a big boat set sail from Lough Swilly bearing ninety-nine passengers. Among them were earls whose families had dominated the north-western part of Ireland for centuries; priests and clerical students bound for Louvain; a Spanish sailor who had been stranded in the time of the Armada and had married and settled in Ireland; and a bardic historian named Tadgh Ó Cianáin, who kept a vivid record of their progress. Foremost of the company was Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, who had in the previous decade sought to unite the disputatious leaders of Gaelic Ireland against the expansionist policies of English monarchs. He had led his troops to a tremendous victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598, the only serious military defeat sustained by English forces on Irish soil: but that had been followed by the wholesale slaughter of the Irish at Kinsale in 1601.

After that, the power of the Gaelic princes was curbed and they seemed a spent force. Their departure in 1607 was so hurried that some men's wives and other men's children were left behind in the confusion. O'Neill's son was seized by the English and raised as a Protestant....Ó Cianáin's wife and children were left as virtual hostages, soon to be stripped of cattle and lands which were his inheritance as a man of learning....

               Mural by Neil O'Dwyer, Bruff, Ireland

In the canon of Irish nationalist history, the Flight of the Earls was the moment when Gaelic Ireland finally collapsed, that conjuncture which saw an entire people robbed of those natural leaders who might have given shape to their aspirations....

The image of their boat taking to the waters entered Irish iconography as an emblem of desolation: "with these/our very souls pass overseas." Subsequent accounts develop the emotion in Mac an Bhaird's poem: "it is said that, as the ship that carried them away set sail down Lough Swilly, a great cry of lament and farewell went up from their followers left upon the shore." With that sentence the Celtic scholar Robin Flower brings his study of Gaelic literature towards its conclusion in a chapter entitled "The End of a Tradition." But... the radical novelist Peadar O'Donnell laughed out loud on reading Flower's lines: for, according to the folk memory of his people, the peasantry of Donegal and Derry stood on the shores of Lough Swilly and cheered as the boat moved away.

        --Declan Kiberd (1951- ), Irish Classics (pub. 2000)

Ozzy Osbourne on antidepressants and Viagra

Q. My GP has put me on antidepressants. Do these drugs have any side effects I should know about?
 --David, Surrey

A. Antidepressants are fabulous things, David, but they’ll play havoc with your meat and two veg. I’ve been taking them for years and what I’ve found is, I can do everything except the aftershow fireworks. So I just end up pumping away on top of Sharon like a road drill all night.

I tried Viagra once, but by the time it kicked in, the missus was fast asleep. So it was just me and this tent pole in front of me, with nothing to do but watch the History Channel.

--Ozzy Osbourne answering health questions in Ask Dr Ozzy (with Chris Ayres) in the London Times.

Radclyffe Hall: The enormous courage of trees

In July came the Allied counter-offensive, and now in her moment of approaching triumph France knew to the full her great desolation, as it lay revealed by the retreating armies. For not only had there been a holocaust of homesteads, but the country was strewn with murdered trees, cut down in their hour of most perfect leafing; orchards struck to the ground, an orgy of destruction, as the mighty forces rolled back like a tide, to recoil on themselves-- incredulous, amazed, maddened by the outrage of coming disaster. For mad they must surely have been, since no man is a more faithful lover of trees than the German.

 

Stephen as she drove through that devastated country would find herself thinking of Martin Hallam-- Martin who had touched the old thorns on the hills with such respectful and pitiful fingers: "Have you ever thought about the enormous courage of trees? I have and it seems to me amazing. The Lord dumps them down and they've just got to stick it, no matter what happens-- that must need some courage." Martin had believed in a heaven for trees, a forest heaven for all the faithful; and looking at those pitiful, leafy corpses, Stephen would want to believe in that heaven.

 

 

           --Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943), The Well of Loneliness (1928)

Sam Gardiner: No thing looks us up in books

No Title

There are things we need words for,
like enamel jug, buttercups, crusty loaf, 

and things we don't, such as love, 

subatomic particles, that shooting star,

 

and there are words we need things for, God,

for example, ghosts, the verse in universe.

 

But nothing needs words for us,

no thing looks us up in books and thinks,

 

How interesting, I must look out for one.

 

       -- Northern Irish poet Sam Gardiner (1936-2016), in The New Irish Poets (2004), ed. Selina Guinness

Jean Rhys: It is alive, this book

  ...it was like a room out of one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something-- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards-- perhaps all your life, who knows?-- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music, everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. "The house I was living in when I read that book," you think, or "This colour reminds me of that book."

     --"Till September Petronella," story  (pub. 1960)  by Jean Rhys (1890-1979), in Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968)