Quotes from Adam Nicolson

A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.

The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain.

t's [King James Bible] subject is majesty, not tyranny, and it's political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one invisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole.

The language of the King James Bible is the language of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.

Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537.

Look at them on days like that, when the wind is blowing through the boundaries of fresh and stiff, and you will see them for what they are: wind-runners, wind-dancers, the wind-spirits, alive with an evolved ability to live with the wind, in it and on it, drawing out its energy to make their own feathered, mobile, ocean-ranging magnificence.

There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature.

Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people"—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine

Homer then has the bard—a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people"—say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine purpose of the war. The war happened so that the poem could happen.

unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a preclassic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.

this was all evidence of the tradition at work, of Homer being more interested in epic music than its meaning.

the first objects to be designed with the sole purpose of killing another person.

It is, in other words, the King James Bible's exact contemporary, the product of precisely the same cultural moment, produced from precisely the same court culture, with precisely the same intention of celebrating and in a certain sense 'housing' James I and his dream of majesty. Can Hatfield House, then, be read as a companion to the Bible whose genesis is so close to its own?

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms/We have imagined for the mighty dead.

genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood

The purity of death holds no attraction for the Homeric Greeks. Their world is one in which the felt, sensed and shared reality, the reality of the human heart, is the only one worth having.

The most intriguing aspect of the Hawara Homer, and other papyri of the same era, is how close they are to the text of Homer as it was transmitted to the Byzantine scholars who were assembling the Venetus A manuscript eight hundred years later.

Look at a wild creature- even hold it in your hand- and it is obvious that you don't 'have' it. You hold it but everything it is stretches far beyond your enclosing fingers, in time and space and through its own interior existence. You may posess it, even for a moment, but it is not yours... Whatever it is to be known remains outside the grip of our knowing it.

in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete.

There will be no peace until the violence is done. Peace is inaccessible without the violence, because violence is righteousness in action.

The Enquiry in England,' Blake said, 'is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in arts and science.

As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men. And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth, But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again. So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies.

At that level through out the 18th century, another vision of admirable behavior persisted. The mob did not want the smooth conformable man, the slick hypocrite who could so politely maneuver his way into the rewards of high politics and high society. They wanted his very opposite, the clever thief. The man who thrived not by using the well oiled wheels of society but by opposing them and cheating them; by attending to the well-being of his own heroic self.

The 19th century had chosen only to remember the happy warrior. The 20th century only the blood come gargling. Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar.