Essays ancient and modern
by Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox · first published 1989
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In the past week I have been reading _Essays Ancient and Modern_ by Bernard Knox. In the autobiographical introduction, he writes of being trained for infiltration behind German lines in WW II, including a class with a master safe cracker, then an inmate of Pentonville…
on “Illegal Engineering” ↗…Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Be Considered As a Science, Immanuel Kant (reread many years after the first reading--interesting to be reminded how awful translations from German can be) Essays Ancient and Modern by Bernard Knox
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗I have recently purchased a copy of Bernard Knox's Essays Ancient and Modern. In the introductory essay, he speaks of shelter in a house during a battle in northern Italy and making his own random probe into a Virgil, finding not a prophecy of the future, but a curiously apropos…
on “Sortes Vergilianae” ↗…a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.” Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked,…
The most important Latin scholar in the world at that time? That is quite a claim. My recollection from Bernard Knox's essay "Closet Modern", collected in Essays Ancient and Modern is that Houseman's work, whatever its quality, was primarily on an author of limited interest. But good for Houseman recovering from bilged examinations. Jonathan Swift did terribly on his examinations,…
on “Housman's Introductory Lecture” ↗