"A Time of Gifts" [.]

[fiefoe]

This book has so many period references that I had a couple of marathon Wikipedia sessions.

John Dee's claim to fame:
__ His giant flying dung beetle carried an actor on its back.. which the protagonist refuelled with his own droppings on the long ascent of Mount Etna.
__ Dee first came to the attention of the larger world when at the age of nineteen, as a student in Cambridge, he mounted a play by Aristophanes, Peace, which calls for a giant dung beetle to fly the hero up to the palace of Zeus. Calling upon his passion for mathematics, before there were stage tricks such as projectors, lighting, motors, or fog machines, Dee indeed made a giant beetle fly around the main hall of Trinity College.

Christian Morgenstern and his nonsense poems:
One time there was a picket fence / with space to gaze from hence to thence.
An architect who saw this sight / approached it suddenly one night,
removed the spaces from the fence, / and built of them a residence.
The picket fence stood there dumbfounded / with pickets wholly unsurrounded,
a view so loathsome and obscene, /  the Senate had to intervene.

Tennyson's "Locksley Hall"
__ In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
__ I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.  
__ I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do?

Thomas Babbington Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome"

Rosamund Lehmann;  "The Scholar Gypsy"  "One Hundred and One Harlequins"
Meyer's Konversations-lexikon; Fischer von Erlach;  Gustavus Adolphus; 
Syrinx; palinodes; Kraken; baldachinos;  fascines; gabions 

Last bits:

• Glaub, was wahr ist; Lieb, was rar ist; Trink, was klar ist.  ('Believe what is true; love what is rare; drink what is clear.')
• Nothing can surprise one in the reported vicissitudes of a total stranger. it is the distant dramas of friends that are the hardest to conjure up.
• the King's School, Canterbury.. a small, tradition-haunted public school of such improbable antiquity - founded a few decades after Justinain closed the pagan academy at Athens

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