Sublime

His really sound and essential conception of Liberty, “Turning to scorn with lips divine The falsehood of extremes,” is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century.

shitmaru,

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.

ociosos

This is the only final greatness of a man; that he does for all the world what all the world cannot do for itself. Dickens, I believe, did it.

It may well be the sentence that for diverse reasons—because thinking about Woolf, or sickness, or essays, because trying to emulate a certain rhythm in my own writing—I’ve copied out by hand more than any other.

Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.

But there can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human event in history; a sort of conflagration and transfiguration in the very heart of what is called the conventional Victorian era; a naked flame of mere natural genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions or philosophies or

that element of the outrageous which is the mother of all adventures sprang up ungovernable,