“A serious house on serious earth”

Philip Larkin, a non-believer, in his poem “Church Going”, describing what churches used to be and wondering what will happen if nobody goes any more, quoted by fellow non-believer Robert Fulford in National Post Dec. 24, 2005

“She could sing like a Florence nightingale.”

Samuel Goldwyn, according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #2 (Oct.-Nov. 2002) [I can’t find any independent confirmation that he ever said it but if not he missed an opportunity… to crib from Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie, who said: “I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.” (See https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_m_barrie_131580)]

In the National Post I describe the new experience of trying to bowl after watching an instructional video, which turned out to be sort of like golf in its comic disaster.

In my latest National Post column I suggest that a priority in 2019 should be refusing to accept lies and applaud deceit in politics… and not only there.

“If at first you don’t succeed, hide the evidence.”

My sister

“The Roman republic did not fall before external foes. It had not been permanently crippled or weakened by long wars against powerful neighbours. What, then, were the faults and weaknesses that brought it to disaster? Were they due to defects in Roman political life or to a faulty machinery of government? Where they the result of an unsound economic system which discouraged the production and upset the distribution among all the people of the good things of this world? Was Roman law unjust, producing social discontent and resentment? Or did the trouble spring from some deeper cause, traceable perhaps to some fundamental change in men’s attitude towards life? If so, was it a matter of altered social relationships between one class and another, between rich and poor, between the old families and fashionable society on the one hand and the unknown ‘common man’ on the other, between the free and the slaves or between the Romans and the Italians or the Romans and foreigners? Beyond all these possible sources of weakness was there a failure of old religious and moral beliefs and a decay of old habits that had in the last resort been the true source of the vitality of the State? Such seem to be the main questions that arise as we read about Cicero…”

Introduction in F.R. Cowell Cicero and the Roman Republic