Take that, slap!

For those who assume academic life is genteel, a couple of quotes:

"A man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie." - Thomas Macauley, who died on this day in 1859.
(From the Today in Literature email.)


A footnote from the Mary Robinson biography (see post above)
* Robert Bass, The Green Dragon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York, 1957) ... though Bass undertook valuable archival research, his transcriptions were riddled with errors, he misdated key incidents, and he failed to notice many fascinating newspaper reports, references in memoirs, and other sources. It is no exaggeration to say that his inaccuracies outnumber his accuracies; if Bass says that an article appeared on November in the Morning Post, one may be assured that it is to be found in December in the Morning Herald. (p. 3)