Scholarship

Vaclav Havel

There is always something suspicious about an intellectual on the winning side.

Makes me feel better already. I used to read Havel a lot, but this line had fallen from my RAM. Sadly, not applicable to rugby.

Not such a novel idea?

by reestheskin on 09/12/2022

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Pond Life: Princeton PhD inspires campus novel | Times Higher Education (THE)

When Jack Williams heard his PhD dissertation would likely be read by just a handful of people, he decided that a novel approach to expanding its reach was needed. Literally. “On average, only five people will read a doctoral thesis – and one of them is usually your housemate – so I thought it would be good if I could smuggle something of my ideas into a book,” said Dr Williams, whose debut novel, Pond Life, is published by RedDoor Press.

I had always thought fiction was an old form evident in many theses.

Machiavelli on study habits (and passion).

by reestheskin on 12/10/2020

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After he had been dismissed from government, and implicated in the anti-Medici conspiracy, Machiavelli was imprisoned, tortured, before returning to the family farm. But his passions ran deep.

…Machiavelli was unable to turn his mind from politics. ‘I could not help but fill your head with castles in the air,’ he wrote to Vettori in 1513, ‘because since Fortune has seen to it that I do not know how to talk about either the silk or wool trade, profits or losses, I have to talk about politics.’ He spent the days chewing the fat with woodcutters on the farm and playing cricca in the tavern. But in the evening, he told Vettori,

I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them … and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that: no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus. [emphasis added]

Erin Maglaque · Free from Humbug: The Murdrous Machiavel · LRB 16 July 2020