Word: bodleian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years of training in lockstep. Healy spent four years studying theology at Belgium's Louvain University. Seven years later he went abroad again, in pursuit of a Ph.D. at Oxford, and if there is an invisible monastery in his life, a spiritual refuge, it is there. At the Bodleian Library he worked in a room containing a first edition of Don Quixote, shelved in the same spot where Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder, placed it in 1605. "It gave me a sense of how high I loomed in the large scale of scholarship, and that's good for a young...
...Fenton, 35, likes to spend his spare time reading the poems of Swift in a canoe. Narrator Redmond O'Hanlon, 37, is a literary naturalist who admits before embarking on the 1983 expedition, "The nearest I had ever come to a tropical rain-forest, after all, was in the Bodleian Library." Actually, he edges a bit closer when he consults some old Borneo hands. "You'll find the high spot of your day," advises one, "is cleaning your teeth. The only bit of you you can keep clean. Don't shave in the jungle, because the slightest nick turns septic...
Oscar Wilde sometimes complained of historians who had fallen into "careless habits of accuracy." He would have relished the work of the British recluse Edmund Backhouse, celebrated in his day (1873-1944) for his translations from the Chinese and his vast Sinological contributions to Oxford's Bodleian Library. The Backhouse oeuvre is filled with an amalgam of profound insight, scholarship and, it now appears, pornography; all it lacks is a single component: truth...
...Toronto, in files of U.S. and British companies. The exposé searched for an aberrant scholar and turned up a consummate rogue. Trapped by bad debts, Backhouse had dropped out of Oxford. In 1898 he showed up in China with faked references; 15 years later he shipped the Bodleian some 17,000 volumes of chinoiserie; later he contributed 18 manuscripts that were blatant forgeries and promised other treasures that did not exist. During World War I, as a sub rosa operative, he embroiled high British officials and even the King in a plot to procure from neutral China at least...
Some of these volumes are still extant, in the Bodleian, in the British Museum, in the Bibliotheque Nationale; secured with chains, too ponderous to cradle in a lap, original editions of Aquinas and Sir Thomas Browne, various Bibles and historical chronicles, lie open on high oaken tables or under glass. Their pages emanate the same subtle dust observable on the wings of a moth beneath a lamp. In the Founder's Library at New College stand row upon row of thick Latin treatises bound in ivory. And as I look through the notices in TLS of Sotheby's auctions...