So, I've finished My Booky Wook, but I'm not focused enough right now to gather my thoughts. Instead, I thought I'd offer this passage from Andrew Motion's biography of Keats, which I've just started.
It was a world fraught with violence. In the factories and the fields, where the conditions of everyday life were routinely shaped by appalling levels of suffering, the danger of rioting was a constant threat. There was a distinctly 'Sturm und Drang quality' about political life too. 'Think of the Earl of Chatham,' one recent historian has urged, 'collapsing in the House of Lords as he made his last manic and incoherent speech against war with America in 1778, or of Edmund Burke flinging a dagger into the floor of the House of Commons in December 1792 as a symbol of his departure from the Foxite Whigs, and of Charles James Fox bursting into tears as a result.' Think too of the Prime Minister Perceval, assassinated in the House of Commons in 1811, or of the startling statistic that nineteen Members of Parliament committed suicide between 1790 and 1820, and that a further twenty lapsed into insanity, as did their king.
Some people think history is dull. I can't imagine they've read the preceding paragraph.
No comments:
Post a Comment