Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS July 10, 2009 from Alex Burghat's review of Danielle Westerhof's "Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England": The tight-knit relationship of body and soul was thought to continue even after death. The Church preached a connection between putrefaction and sin--whereas run-of-the-mill cadavers decayed, the bodies of the saints remained as incorrupt on Earth as their souls would be in Heaven. . . . Medieval nobles, Westerhof shows, extended this idea by seeking to conserve the form of their bodies, even in death. The crucial factor in this was the developing mindset of a new knightly caste which strongly valued and guarded its own physical prowess. So it was that the bodies which were preserved in life by ornate armour were, after death, preserved through embalming or (by the early thirteenth century) in stone effigy. *** from Guy Dammann's review of the Aldeburgh Festival 2009: Readers of Paul Griffiths's invaluable book Modern Music learn on the first p...

On the occasion of the centenary of Robert Browning's birth, Henry James gave a talk under the auspices of the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature. In the talk "The Novel in The Ring and the Book " James described the sense of place--Tuscany and Rome--in Shelley, Swinburne and Browning: Shelley, let us say in the connection, is a light, and Swinburne is a sound--Browning alone is a temperature.  I think that is a mighty fine way of putting things. It makes me want to be a temperature too, with its associations of temper, temperament, tempered. To be a temperature is to touch the whole skin, and through the skin, to get under it, and not just appeal to the eyes or ears. It is to be a whole climate.