Reading Rat October 2008 On authors and works in my recommended reading:

(on Stephen Hawking)
To make sense of Hawking’s paradox one must consider how much information, measured in bits, the 1s and 0s of binary code, can fit inside a black hole. The amount, it turns out, does not depend on the black hole’s volume, as one might expect, but on the area of its “horizon” — the flat, funnel-like mouth of the cosmic rabbit hole. --George Johnson

(on George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh)
Orwell had fought in the Spanish civil war; his disillusion with that cause is chronicled in “Homage to Catalonia”. Waugh was part of an ill-fated military mission to the cynical, wily Communist partisans in Yugoslavia. His disillusion is told in his masterpiece, the “Sword of Honour” trilogy... .--The Economist

(on Adolf Hitler)
The failure to dominate the East was what doomed Hitler’s empire; but the myth of Lebensraum is what made him what he was. It was also his solution to the conundrum of a nationalist empire: the racist elevation of one nation so far above all others that mass extermination seems obviously permissible. --Timothy Snyder
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

(on Somerset Maugham)
Somerset Maugham's plays are seldom revived, but when one is, you can bet on it being "The Constant Wife," a marital comedy of manners. --Damien Jaques

(on Ernst Haeckel)
His great achievement was to create an evolutionary synthesis that drew on new fields and data to provide powerful demonstrations and empirical evidence for the descent and modification of species... --P. D. Smith
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

(on Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Where the Romantics and Decadents self-indulgently embraced Sade as a liberator, Dostoevsky confronted and repudiated him, and reaffirmed the Christian worldview that Sade so ferociously rejected. --John Attarian

(on A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke)
Locke would not have wished to be read as though he were infallible, since he believed in reason, not authority. But his doctrine of general toleration is the more persuasive because he recognises that some things are not tolerable. --William Rees-Mogg
(via Roger Kimball at ArmaVirumque)

(on Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
Solzhenitsyn uses Christ’s own words to show the “secondary significance” of the state structure: “‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’—not because every Caesar deserves it, but because Caesar’s concern is not with the most important thing in our lives.” --Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Alexis Klimoff

(on Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot)
Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century. --Jeffrey Hart

(on Heinrich Heine)
Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Midd1e Age than Gorres, or Brentano, or Arnim, Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel,--along with but above the power of the fascinating 1liddle Age itself,--the power of modern ideas. --Matthew Arnold

(on William Shakespeare)
Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

(on Francis Bacon)
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his Novum Scientiarum Organum. This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the scaffold was no longer of service. --Voltaire  ¶ 10/26/2008 08:38:00 AM