Sublime

He couldn’t seem to stop the flow of his thoughts to his mouth.

Sir Henry Garraway,

But along with the consumer revolution there now emerged an intellectual revolution that sharply altered the understanding of the role of ‘vanities’ in an economy. In 1705, a London physician called Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract (unusually but charmingly written in verse) entitled The Fable of the Bees, which proposed that – contra

We know from the letter-books of King Jayme II of Aragon (1291–1327) that he cultivated an extensive network of informers in Italy and elsewhere. His surviving letter-books record an impressive fifteen thousand items of incoming intelligence.33 The king received information from a wide variety of correspondents, including Cristiano Spinola, a merch

Here the part is certainly greater than the whole, for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things to deprive you of the capacity to wonder.

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.