Word: darwin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...references to Jos Sedley, the buffoon in Vanity Fair, underscores the scope of Darwin's literary erudition, if not his uncanny ability to always fit the quote to the situation at hand. It is a difficult task indeed to find a paragraph in Mostly Golf free of a literary snippet. Darwin was as at home writing an introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as he was smashing a niblick off the Kentish heath...
...Darwin venerated Dickens and could recite Tom Brown's Schooldays by heart, but his taste in literature reflects his deeply ingrained Victorian sensibilities. Mostly Golf contains a rather moving essay entitle "Dickens in Time of War," written in 1915 before Darwin found himself running an Ordinance Depot in Mesopotamia. Darwin's stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from Sam and Tony Weller while the cricket match between Dingley Dell and All Muggleton in the Pickwick Papers was for Darwin the penultimate tribute to the glories of English countrified society...
...SOBER Victorian sense of priorities effected Darwin's style of golf reporting as well. He believed in opening a story with a leisurely reflection on the weather and any other aspect of the day's events that struck his fancy. In those years, two rounds were played on the final day of a tournament so Darwin would digest the morning round over a midday meal. Afterwards, he would compose his article while sipping port, always for he did not believe in taking highlights out of sequence. This dignified attitude is transparent in what is considered the most famous line Darwin...
Although he lived to 1961, Darwin was patently a 19th century figure whose values are closer to those espoused at the Battle of Waterloo than to those of the present. The cult of Darwinia surrounding his personal escapades almost transforms him into a character out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. He played in the 1921 British Amateur Championship and eliminated the last American contender in the field. That same night, Darwin was accosted on a lonely street by a mysterious stranger who bellowed, "Sir, I would like to thank you for the way in which you saved your country...
...cousin Gwen Raverat in a family memoir describes Darwin on his fourteenth birthday "lying with his long Etonian legs on the sofa in a negligent, grown-up attitude." While at Eton, Darwin engaged in quoting contests to see who knew Pickwick Papers the best. He practiced for these contests by seeing if he could continue out loud once he reached the bottom of a page. Certainly, Darwin would have ascribed to the Duke of Wellington's statement that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," for he considered the English public school, as epitomized...