“To [Cardinal Allen], as to all the Roman writers, Protestants were the very reverse of ‘puritans’: they were ‘soft physitions’ . . . against whom he must assert a doctrine admittedly sterner and darker, ‘the behoulding whereof must neades ingender som sorowe and sadnesse of minde’ and even (such is our ‘frailetie’) ‘a certaine bitter …
Legions of Untalented Hacks
“The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miro devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 121).
Congregants or Clients?
“Instead of pastoral ministry, which seeks even-handedness for all concerned (whether they are present or abasent) and reconciliation between them when possible, we are seeing more and more professional service which places the counselor in the position of an attorney. The difference is between a counselor who takes money from a client, and who then …
Somehow or Other
“Somehow or other during the latter part of the sixteenth century Englishmen learned to write” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 418).
Hypocrisy of the Heart
“Such artists strained after emotions not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel. This, of course, is one of the sources of sentimentality; it is the tribute that vanity pays to compassion” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 119).
American Elizabethans
[Speaking of Nashe] “Its appeal is almost entirely to that taste for happy extravagance in language and triumphant impudence of tone, which the Elizabethans have, perhaps, bequeathed rather to their American than to their English descendants” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 412).
Doublethink
“Doublethink—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas and assent to both—is with us too, and will remain so as long as we have large bureaucracies that claim to act for our own good while pursuing their own institutional interests” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 112).
The Greatness of Martin Marprelate
“Martin [Marprelate] himself had of course a serious intention and must, for all his motley, be regarded as a heroic figure. Nor have I any sympathy with those who make prim mouths at him for introducing scurrility into a theological debate, for debate was precisely what the bishops had suppressed. Those who refuse to let …
Aristocracy is Not Deity
“[Virginia Woolf] protests and complains as a woman and as a writer, but above all as a human being, who has discovered with bitterness that being born privileged does not alter the conditions and limitations of human existence” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 75).
A Medieval Puritan
“I am not arguing that [Edmund] Spenser was not a Calvinist. A priori it is very likely that he was. But his poetry is not so written as to enable us to pick out his own beliefs in distinct separation from kindred beliefs. When a modern writer is didactic he endeavours, like Shaw or M. …