671f660
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Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called , or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament--the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana--is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.
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reading
writing
christianity
inspiration
religion
ancient-greeks
cana
entheos
judaea
marriage-at-cana
mullahs
omar-khayyam
symposia
iran
hellenism
passover
passover-seder
oxford
new-testament
boredom
brotherhood
plato
miracles
atheism
food
wine
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Christopher Hitchens |
4bbe382
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Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.
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oxford
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Evelyn Waugh |
c437587
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"Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn't quite recognize", Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the
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television
politics
friendship
diana-princess-of-wales
martin-walker-reporter
marty-peretz
nightline
presidency-of-bill-clinton
sidney-blumenthal
the-guardian
the-new-republic
university-of-oxford
pettiness
oxford
argumentation
mother-teresa
bill-clinton
journalism
united-states
england
betrayal
london
new-york
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Christopher Hitchens |
04a490b
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The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]
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science
education
baron-c-p-snow
baron-snow
c-p-snow
charles-percy-snow
ernest-rutherford
nucleus
rutherford
oxford
cambridge
study
physics
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Richard Rhodes |
a7c732d
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Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.
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oxford
sexism
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Jeanette Winterson |
21eebfe
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I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There's an international symbol for the gents' toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.
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reading
disadvantaged
gents-toilets
martin-sharpe
pacino
telly
learning-to-read
oxford
prodigy
intelligent
symbol
tutoring
english
fruit
heroin
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Nick Hornby |
84b395a
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I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not return one to stone. -- Oscar Wilde, letter to Louis Wilkinson (December 28, 1898) in the beginning of the book
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oxford
oscar-wilde
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Julia Whelan |