Quotes from Adam Nicolson

In every one of the villages

there is a tall marble memorial on which the names of their dead are listed.

John Smyth, originally from Gainsborough, but by 1608 pastor of the Brethren of the Separation of the Second English Church at Amsterdam, its congregation made up of Lincolnshire farmers, decided that they needed to hear the scriptures in the original. One can only imagine the effect on the poor exiles from Gainsborough: hour on hour of Smyth reading out passages of Hebrew and Greek of which they had not the faintest understanding, desperately looking for the sanctity in this.

Laurence Chaderton, the moderate Puritan leader, once paused after two hours of a Cambridge sermon. The entire congregation stood up and shouted, 'For God's sake go on!' He gave them another hour.

In those days, now it was in those days, In those nights, now it was in those nights, In those years, now it was in those years

recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;

The king who could get so drunk with his brother-in-law was also the king who was anxious for an inclusive church and an inclusive Bible. It was the dream of civilisation

For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge often sent their promising young fellows abroad to buy books for their libraries (which were tiny; it was thought a great achievement during Savile's time at Merton that he increased their number of printed books from 300 to 1,000), and in 1578 Savile was sent out on a long European tour.

As if on cue, in 1608, golf was introduced from Scotland for the first time, played around a 5-hole course on Blackheath, south of London. The leather balls, stuffed with feathers, lasted no more than one game each, particularly if it rained. At 5 shillings a time, it was a ruinously expensive but a strangely consoling pursuit, fitted to a country replete with contentment.

This moving story of a small group of people, driven by a passionate belief in the strict purity of their devotion to the word of God and an equally passionate rejection of worldly authority in favour of a divinely sanctioned life, scarcely registered on the consciousness of England.

Sometimes looking at the fulmar's gaping, mouth-opening, mutually frenzied, head-bobbing, nibbling, shout-laughing version of 'I love you/I hate you', which can begin calmly enough but then builds to a tumultuous, guffawing, totalizing climax, I have thought that only in the ecstatic moments of life can we come near to knowing the reality of a bird's mind.

Ignorance is not bliss; it's a missed opportunity

And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul's Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6:11–13: O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged. Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels. Nowe for a recompense in the same, (I speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged.

It is to do with John Overall's lust. The poor man, who was forty-four in 1604, found it easier, he told his friends, to preach in Latin, which he had studied so hard and so long, and that he found it 'troublesome to speak English as a continued oration'. Despite (or perhaps because of?) that rather unworldly removal from everyday discourse, the dean fell in love with and married the sexiest girl in London. Anne Orwell was irresistible:

Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek

The Odyssey is constantly free and constantly inventive.

That difference is reflected in the two heroes.

Achilles is fixed into rage, into the need to fulfill his fate, fixed into having to revenge the death of his friend Patroclus.

is a Naked, and Open day light, that doth not shew the Masques, and Mummeries, and Triumphs of the world, halfe so Stately, and daintily, as candlelights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearle, that sheweth best by day: But it will not rise to the price of a Diamond, or Carbuncle, that sheweth best in varied lights. A mixture of a Lie doth ever adde Pleasure.

Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything

To Lancelot Andrewes, always insistent on the value of ceremony, this was absurd. Did Protestants pretend, he asked, that God 'will have us worship him like elephants, as if we had no joints in our knees?

but also thought of everything, invented everything and changed everything.

was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters Ã¢â'¬Â¦ They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.