HEDYLOGOS – the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentines cards, love-letters and romantic fiction.
Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner.
The British are like that, especially the middle class Radio 4 audience: a young snappy, angry person annoys them, and they shout at the radio for him to show some respect and get the spiritual and intellectual equivalent of a haircut. But let the same sentiments exactly, word for word, be uttered in high academic tones, as if by a compound of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Anthony Quinton, and they will roll onto their tummies and purr.
Matters of immense import may depend on such issues, but we can never do more than guess the outcomes of the roads we do not take.
Strife’s sister NEMESIS was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition – the vice that the Greeks called hubris.
My mother has an absolute passion for sour fruit and can strip a gooseberry bush quicker than a priest can strip a choirboy.
Goodness me. You don’t ask for the moon, do you?” “Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I’d love the moon, please. That will be all. I’ll never ask for anything ever again ever.
Few people in one’s life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.
A Hungarian Jew, as he looked to observe, is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first.
His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea’s low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope towards the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny.
His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless.
We recognize that if we had ever encountered the real demon demigod Achilles, we woul have feared and dreaded him, hated his temper, despised his pride and been repelled by his savagery. But we know too that we could not have helped loving him.
Such attitudes are grotesque, impudent and irrelevant. ‘Could do better’ is a meaningless conclusion. ‘Could be happier’ is the only one that counts.
A small proportion to be spent on production, the rest for wine and senseless riot.
There is such a thing as the power of suggestion, however. One human mind is capable of being hypnotised or persuaded by another. We have faith, we have Hitler, we have advertising.
Well, we all know how satisfying it is to recite the shortcomings and hollowness of others – especially those who have money and recognition where we have none. It is certainly more pleasurable than inspecting our own shortcomings.
But this is England, where the only crime is to be Found Out.
The plans of the immortals, however, are as subject to the cruel tricks of Moros as are the plans of mortals.
I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective. Political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking how effective it might be. I do relish transgression and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy.
What the eye doesn’t see the stomach doesn’t heave over.