Word: antiquarians
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...them down, said the practical prelates, and sell the sites. At city prices of close to $300 a square foot, this would provide a fabulous windfall with which to build new churches in the suburbs, raise clerical salaries and finance overseas missions. The mere thought of such desecration gave antiquarian Anglicans the pip: the City's churches-especially Wren's-were national treasures, they cried. The war damage should be repaired, and the churches could be turned into museums to remind traipsing tourists and native agnostics of the Church of England's ancient glory...
...Antiquarian Thrill. Many a parody ends as a work of art in its own right, its original forgotten; the brilliant parasite fly emerges from the husk of its host. As "an antiquarian thrill," Macdonald offers the reader the original pious rhymes upon which Lewis Carroll based his verses in Alice in Wonderland. Demonstrating some sparkling footnotework, Macdonald has ranged the whole wide field of self-declared parody. He starts with Chaucer (only students of Mid. Eng. Lit. will get much of this one) and winds up with the latest chic spoof of Truman Capote based on a New York Times...
...Marquand's last book is not a novel, but it is only his novelist's hand that saves it from being merely a literary curiosity. Good family boy that he was, Marquand never lost his gossip's and antiquarian's interest in the past of Newburyport, Mass., a place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote a book about a fascinating 18th century eccentric, Lord Timothy...
...Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Houghton Mifflin; 1946) by Ruth Benedict. A brilliant tour de force written by a U.S. anthropologist who had never set foot in Japan, but who, through interviews, the study of antiquarian papers and Japan's own vast literature about itself, reached penetrating conclusions about Japanese society, its disciplines and its notions of good and evil...
...snobs of sorts, chiefly two: newness snobs and oldness snobs. Two well-traveled igth century U.S. writing men, Mark Twain and Henry James, stand like archsentinels at these two poles. Twain, the apostle of modernity, prized Italian railroads "more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art treasures." Antiquarian Henry James found the restoration of Venice's St. Mark's "crude" and "monstrous," even though the basilica might otherwise have crumbled about the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco.*This conflict adds a fillip to two thoroughly engaging travel books that should please the chairborne as well...