It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn't even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with...
It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what ...
All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of esta...
Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity ...
On various occasions, especially in trying to think of western American history in the context of the worldwide history of colonialism, it has struck me that much of the mental behavior that we sometimes denounce as ethnocentrism and cultural insensi...
To whom shall I offer this book, young and sprightly, Neat, polished, wide-margined, and finished politely? To you, my Cornelius, whose learning pedantic, Has dared to set forth in three volumes gigantic The history of ages—ye gods, what a labor!�...
The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom only the Greek word lives...
Colonel Saito: Attention, English prisoners! Notice I do not say "English soldiers". From the moment you surrendered, you ceased to be soldiers. You will finish the bridge by the twelfth day of May. You will work under the direction of a Japanese eng...
In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.
I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.
I found that I was just hopeless at school. It was just a total bore. First, I passed in art and English, and then just art. Then I passed out.
The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!
French name, English accent, American school. Anna confused.
Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language
But the English are different, and they don’t know how to be other than different.
I used to write a lot of songs. I was an English major in college. I was a deluded poet for a year. Totally deluded.
I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.
Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.
Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.
