Word: macaulay
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...MACAULAY: THE SHAPING OF THE HISTORIAN by JOHN CLIVE 499 pages. Alfred A. Knopf...
Thomas De Quincey's mother, who ought to have known one when she saw one, called the infant Thomas Babington Macaulay a "baby genius." From the age of three, "Clever Tom" was a compulsive reader whose idea of a wild childhood game was to act out Homer, reserving for himself the role of Achilles. At six, the future author of the five-volume History of England was at work on a compendium of world history...
CATHEDRAL: The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay. 80 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95. This marvelous book recreates the building of a French Gothic cathedral, from the hewing down of half a forest to the placement of the last sheet of lead on the spire. Macaulay, a young architect, uses voluminous knowledge and pen-and-ink sketches, accompanied by a brief, clear narrative. He shows how to design and build a flying buttress, cast a bell in bronze, use the mortise-and-tenon method on the roof beams. By changing his viewpoint, he also powerfully conveys the immense rook-filled...
...History of England, Macaulay was writing about the late 17th century when, he said, smallpox was "the most terrible of all the ministers of death." But a mere 25 years ago, smallpox was still a scourge prevalent in 80 countries. A majority of the world's population lived in areas where the disease was endemic. Now the malady is so close to extinction that it is expected to become the first "natural" disease-as opposed to a man-made ailment, like radiation sickness-to be eradicated worldwide...
...journalistic writing enough to satisfy his restless intellect? "Well," says Wills, "not in the sense that I'm going to give up writing about the classics. But many of the best writers in English have been journalists: Dickens, Macaulay, Johnson, Mencken, Twain, Mailer. Even today some of the best writing is in journalism-perhaps the best. In a world of specialists, somebody has to be a courier among specialties...