A selection of writings, speeches, photographs and events as well as some of my favourite literary passages.
Wednesday 29 August 2007
Favourite Places
A new one - St Emilion. No wonder it's a World Heritage Site
And every lovely spot needs a lovely hotel - and this has one of the best - the Hostellerie de Plaisance, at the base of the tower on top of St Emilion
Monday 6 August 2007
Saturday 28 July 2007
Saturday 14 July 2007
Favourite Places - Old Winchester Hill
Kei running up Old Winchester Hill with Stocks cottages behind her - harvest time 1993. Click here for another photo taken of the cottages (in 1998) from a similar viewpoint
Friday 13 July 2007
Memorials
Litchfield Churchyard |
And while we are about memorials, this inscription by Thomas Carew
on Lady Mary Wentworth's tomb has always seemed to me to be an
admirable way to be remembered
Good to the poor, to kindred dear
To servants kind, to friendship clear
To nothing but herself severe
But click the heading for a short biography of Mary Wentworth and
wonder if she quite merited this epitaph
War Memorials
The War Cloister at Winchester College |
A beautiful war poem, inscribed on the War Cloisters at Winchester College:
Polliciti Meliora
As one who, gazing on a vista
Of beauty, sees the clouds close in,
And turns his back in sorrow, hearing
The thunderclouds begin,
So we, whose life was all before us,
Our hearts with sunlight filled,
Left in the hills our books and flowers,
Descended, and were killed.
Write on the stone no words of sadness -
Only the gladness due,
That we, who asked the most of living,
Knew how to give it too.
Of beauty, sees the clouds close in,
And turns his back in sorrow, hearing
The thunderclouds begin,
So we, whose life was all before us,
Our hearts with sunlight filled,
Left in the hills our books and flowers,
Descended, and were killed.
Write on the stone no words of sadness -
Only the gladness due,
That we, who asked the most of living,
Knew how to give it too.
Frank Thompson (Coll, 1933-1938)*
Click the heading for more photos from the War Cloisters
Click the heading for more photos from the War Cloisters
On a war memorial in a British cemetery on the island of Vis in the Adriatic
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
AE Houseman
Then Abraham bound the lad with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son -
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Wilfred Owen
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
Thomas Hardy - At Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'
*Thompson volunteered although under age and was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1940, subsequently serving in the GHQ Liaison Regiment in Libya, Persia, Iran and Sicily. Parachuted into Yugoslavia, he was ambushed in May 1944 with a group of Bulgarian partisans near Sofia. Although he was wearing uniform when captured, he was treated as a spy. 'Tried' at Litakovo, he defended himself in fluent Bulgarian condemning Fascism. He was shot on 10 June 1944. Thompson had a working knowledge of nine European languages. This poem compares with the best of the First World War. The title is Latin, and means 'having promised better things'.
History of the Peloponnesian War
Pericles |
For of the Gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but inherit it and shall bequeath it to all time, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we, would do as we do.
Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War - The Athenians to the Melians
Monday 9 July 2007
Friday 6 July 2007
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