"To ensure their safe return, some monasteries put their volumes under anathemata, threatening unfaithful borrowers with excommunication." -- Andrew Pettigree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Library (London: Profile Books, 2021), p 40 Also posted at https://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/1104607.html.

"The vicissitudes of old books furnish a romantic chapter in the history of literature. About the end of the eighteenth century, the library of an old Lincolnshire house was overhauled by someone who weeded out a lot of what he no doubt considered rubbish. These were destroyed, except for a few which were begged by the gardener, who probably wanted ( Read more... )

"Mind Dickie teks things varry literal. He's watchin' Ted Heath mekkin a speech at the Convarsative Conference when it was on the telly. "We must, we must" sez Ted "Wage war against poverty". So Dick gans strite oot and shoots a tramp."
---Dick Irwin and Scott Dobson, Geordie Laffs (Newcastle: Frank Graham, ( Read more... )

"As the antients had their Capitoline and their Olympian Jupiter, so we had our virgin of Winchester and our virgin of Walsingham: and as there were temples to the Capitoline Jupiter in other places, as well as on the Capitoline hill, and one at Athens in particular; so we had places dedicated to the virgin of Winchester, in other places as well as ( Read more... )

"Time-serving reviewers, those sensitive registers of the day-to-day changes in current and temperature, no longer invite their readers to sneer at Mr. Leavis, and Cambridge seems to be becoming increasingly aware to whom it owes its international reputation for English studies. The Leavis case is fortunately the rare one of the obnoxious character ( Read more... )

"be ashured I shall give my consent to mary to no man till I be tuenty yiers of ag, and then I hop in God I shall not be in great danger of bearing bairns. I got word from Dr Waderburn that if I maried now I should haserd both my oun life and my chyld's ( Read more... )

In seventeenth-century Britain a change from one denomination to another threatened not just eternal damnation but damage to one's material condition in the present. This was especially true in Scotland where the identity of the Scottish Church was more contested than it was in England and the elite arguably broader and more fissured. In 1688 ( Read more... )

For Brasenose, Robert Hewison and Michael Palin produced John Mortimer's radio play Call Me a Liar. A slight school-of-Billy-Liar piece, Philip Hodgson played the anti-hero Sammy Noles amusingly, a compulsive a defensive liar who is finally redeemed by the love of Martha Heinz. Good attention to detail, marred only by a recalcitrant moustache. ( Read more... )

From The St James's Chronicle or British Evening Post, 27 December 1764:

"We hear that there are Cabbage Roses now blown in the garden of Mr. Snelgrove, at Heytesbury, as beautiful as if it were the Month of June."

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2013/11/26/cabbage-roses.html.

From the Public Advertiser, 2 November 1779 ( Read more... )