A NOVEL ABOUT RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, DARWINISM, MEDIAEVAL ART, AMERICA AND WHORES :
"Your father ventured the opinion that Mr Darwin
should be exhibited in a cage in the zoological gardens.
In the monkeyhouse.
I tried to explain some of the scientific arguments behind the Darwinian position.
I was unsuccesful.
He did say that he would not let his daughter marry a man
who considered his grandfather to be an ape" (p.7)
"A species must change...?
In order to survive.
It must adapt itself to changes in the environment" (p.290)
"The vicar of Lyme had the knack of a certain fervid eloquence in his sermons;
and he kept the church free of crucifixes, images, ornaments
and all other signs of the Romish cancer" (p.22)
"But Charles had also the advantage of having read, very much in private,
for the book had been prosecuted for obscenity,
a novel that had apppeared in France some ten years before.
A novel profoundly deterministic in its assumptions, the celebrated Madame Bovary." (p.120)
"It was a fixed article of Charles' creed
that he was not like the great majority of his peers and contemporaries.
That was why he had travelled so much;
he found English society too hidebound,
English solemnity too solemn,
English thought too moralistic,
English religion too bigoted.
So ?
In this vital matter of the woman with whom he had elected to share his life,
had he not been only too conventional ?
And his mind wandered back to Sarah...
He said to himself : it is the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me..." (p.129,130)
"It seems to me that Mr Gladstone at least recognizes a radical rottenness
in the ethical foundations of our times." (p.152)
"In spite of Hegel, the Victorians were not a dialectically minded age;
they did not think naturally in opposites,
of politives and negatives as aspects of the same whole.
Paradoxes troubled rather than pleased them.
They were not the people for existentialist moments,
but for chains of cause and effect..." (p.250)
"I am not a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra.
I know I say things that sometimes grate on your ears,
I bore you about domestic arrangements,
I hurt you when I make fun of your fossils..." (p.382)
"...a lengthy discussion as to the respective merits of the mother country
and the rebellious colony...
that one day America might supersede the older species...
The Canaan they saw across the Atlantic was not the Canaan he dreamt..." (p.433)