"All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use." - A.E. Housman
"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now." - A Shropshire Lad, A.E. Housman

In 1942 Housman deposited an essay in the British Library, with the proviso that it was not to be published for twenty-five years. The essay discussed A. E. Housman's homosexuality and his love for Moses Jackson. Despite the conservative nature of the times, Housman, as distinct from the prudence of his public life, was quite open in his poetry, and especially his A Shropshire Lad, about his deeper sympathies. His poem, 'Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?', written after the trial of Oscar Wilde, addressed more general social injustice towards homosexuality. In the poem the prisoner is suffering 'for the colour of his hair', a natural, given attribute which, in a clearly coded reference to homosexuality.

"Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!" - Othello, William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 2 after he has killed Desdemona

"I have put before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." - Deuteronomy 30:19

"...I have a journey sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no." - Hector
"The weight of this sad time we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
- King Lear, William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 3

Hymns Ancient and Modern - a Church of England hymnal.

Renaissance Man - a man who has broad intellectual interests and is accomplished in areas of both the arts and the sciences.

La Vie en Rose - Edith Piaf's signature song recorded in 1946.

A French singer and cultural icon of partly Algerian and Italian descent, Edith Piaf is almost universally regarded as France's greatest popular singer.

The Catcher in the Rye - a novel by J.D. Salinger.

"Let each child that's in your care-"
"Have as much neurosis as the child can bear." - W.H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron

Hecatomb - like holocaust, a word associated with sacrifice. In this sense, 'holocaust' refers to an animal sacrifice by fire,

"...since Wilfred Owen says men were dying like cattle, [hecatombs] is the appropriate word." - referring to Wilfred Owen's famous WWI poem, Anthem for a Doomed Youth.

Trench warfare - static lines of defence in war, with each side basing soldiers in trenches as a means of defence.

Haig - Field Marshal Douglas Haig, nicknamed 'Butcher of the Somme', one of the more controversial figures in WWI.

"The humiliation of Germany at Versailles." - refers to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a formal peace treaty with Germany at the close of WWI. It included that Germany take full responsibility for the war and imposed several restrictions of territorial, military and economic matters.

"Ruhr and the Rhineland." - refers to the Ruhr Crisis. France sent forces to occupy the Ruhr, an area in the north of the Rhineland, in an effort to force Germany to once again make reparation payments, which they stopped in 1923. Britain and the United States did not support this action.

"The collapse of the Weimar Republic" - in the late 1920s and early 1930s, towards the beginning of depression in Germany, the Weimar Republic saw the rise of the popularity of the Nazi party.

The Cenotaph - The Cenotaph in Whitehall, London.

It is where the national ceremony takes place on Remembrance Sunday (11th November, the day hostilities ceased in the First World War).

The Last Post - a bugle call used to commemorate those who have died in war. It is sounded on Remembrance Sunday following the two minutes' silence.

Passchendaele - refers to the 1917 battle of Passchendaele. Dakin is referring to Haig's controversial campaign, in which damage was inflicted to the German Army at great expense to the lives of British troops.

The Somme - refers to the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Exact casualty figures vary, but several hundred thousand were killed in battle, a large proportion of these on the first day. Again, blame was laid upon Haig's leadership.

The Unknown Soldier - the Unknown Soldier is an unidentified soldier killed in battle, buried with full military honours as a symbol of all the unidentified soldiers killed in battle. The British tomb dedicated to the 'Unknown Warrior' is found in London, and contains the body of an unidentified soldier killed in the First World War.

Siegfried Sassoon - an English poet famous for his anti-war poetry.

"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied." - Common Form, Rudyard Kipling

Rembrandt - Dutch painter, 1606 - 1669.

"Those long uneven lines standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park..." - MCMXIV, Philip Larkin.

Philip Larkin was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the publication in 1955 of his second collection,
Like our own Dave Simms, who plays Hector, Larkin was born in the city of Coventry in England and was educated at King Henry VIII School. Now there's a link! (Free Mars Bar awarded to anyone who emails Mixed Salad having spotted this connection!)

Western Front - the term used in WWI and WWII to describe the frontier between the Allied Forces and Germany.

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered - 1940s song with lyrics by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rogers.

Features in the musical Pal Joey sung by Rita Hayworth.

"O villainy! Let the door be locked!
Treachery! Seek it out." - Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 2

The Trial - a novel by Franz Kafka, about a man arrested and charged with a crime he knows nothing about.

Kafka was an Austrian Jewish writer who also wrote The Castle and Metamorphosis; his writing style led to a style known as magical realism.

"The person from Porlock" - a reference to the story of the visitor to Coleridge during the writing of Kubla Khan, resulting in the poem's incomplete status.

"Don Giovanni: the Commendatore" - Don Giovanni is an opera by Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte. Il Commendatore is a significant character in the work.

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock." - Revelation 3:20

"Did the knights knock at the door of Canterbury before they murdered Beckett?" - Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1162 - 1170) was assassinated inside Canterbury Cathedral. He was later canonised in 1173.

Now, Voyager - a 1942 film starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid.

The movie is about a woman who falls in love whilst in therapy after a nervous breakdown.

"The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find." - Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman.

The Carry On films - a series of British comedy films, parodies of famous historical and literary events or people. Here's an extract from Carry On Teacher (seemed appropriate!)

They are famous for their excessive use of double entendres and slapstick comedy.

George Orwell - an English author and journalist, who was famous for his political and social commentary in his essays and novels.

Stalin - First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Part from 1922 to 1953, effectively becoming a dictator by the late 1920s.

Henry VIII - Second Tudor King of England, reigning from 1491 - 1547. Responsible for the introduction of Protestantism to England.

"Mrs Thatcher" - Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1975-1990. She was the first (and, thus far, only) female Prime Minister in Britain.

Pearl Harbour - the attack on Pearl Harbour took place in 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American naval base at that location. Franklin Roosevelt, the President at the time, delivered the Infamy Speech condemning the attack.

Francis Bacon - English philosopher, knighted by James I in 1603.

Virginia Woolf – born on 25 January 1882. She was an English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own, with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She committed suicide.

The Mikado - an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, first opening in 1885.

"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." - Pensées, a philosophical work by Blaise Pascal.

"Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm." - Lullaby, W. H. Auden

"England, you have been here too long,
And the songs you sing are the songs you sung
On a braver day. Now they are wrong." - Voices Against England in the Night, Stevie Smith

Not Waving But Drowning - a poem by Stevie Smith, published in 1957.

Brief Encounter - a 1945 film starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, telling the story of a couple, both married, who meet in a railway station and soon fall in love.

This scene takes place at the end of the film, when Laura (Celia Johnson) returns to her husband, rather than the man she has just fallen in love with.

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross - a hymn written by Isaac Watts.

Matins - Early morning or late night prayers, a feature of many Christian denominations.

"A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God. - Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, T. S. Eliot

Piero della Francesca - an Italian Renaissance artist.

Nietzsche - a German philosopher, writing in the 1800s.

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" - Gerontion, T.S. Eliot.

"The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I." - On Wenlock Edge, A. E. Housman

"To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
And long 'tis like to be." - A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman

Plato - an ancient Greek philosopher, who wrote about the teachings of Socrates. The notion of Platonic love is found, in one example, in his discussion of the relationship between Socrates and the young Alcibiades.

Michelangelo - Italian Renaissance artist.

He is famous focus upon the aesthetic of male beauty and the homoeroticism which may be found in his work.

Oscar Wilde - English playwright and poet of the nineteenth century. He was famously tried and sentenced for his homosexuality.

Rupert Brooke - an English poet, most famous for his First World War poetry. Posner here quotes the opening of his poem The Soldier.

"The Zulu Wars" - a reference to the war between the Zulus and the United Kingdom in the 1870s.

"The Boer War" - refers to either the first or the second Boer wars, fought between the British Empire and the Boer Republics in the late 1800s.

"The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo." - Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 2

Rievaulx Abbey - Cistercian abbey destroyed by Henry VIII as part of the dissolution of the monasteries

The Subjunctive: - a verb is in the subjunctive mood when it expresses a condition, which is doubtful or not factual. It is most often found in a clause beginning with the word if.

The Seventh Veil – movie starring James Mason and Anne Todd.

A once world famed pianist, escapes from her hospital room and tries to commit suicide by jumping off a local bridge. She is rescued and undergoes psychological treatment by Dr. Larsen who makes Francesca talk about her past.

When I’m cleaning windows – George Formby – see lyrics. This was the tune being sung by the boys.

Vincent Van Gogh – Dutch painter – Sunflowers, Irises, Starry Night

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” - Wittgenstein - The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Raised in a prominent Viennese family, Ludwig Wittgenstein studied mathematics and pursued philosophical studies at Cambridge before entering the Austrian army during World War I. The notebooks he kept as a soldier became the basis for his Tractatus, which later earned him a doctorate and exerted a lasting influence on the philosophers of the Vienna circle. After giving away his inherited fortune, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, where he developed a new conception of the philosophical task. His impassioned teaching during this period influenced a new generation of philosophers, who tried to capture it in The Blue and Brown Books (dictated 1933-35). From the late 'thirties, Wittgenstein himself began writing the materials which would be published only after his death.

“tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner” – to understand everything, is to forgive everything
Just prior to Yom Kippur, Jews will ask forgiveness of those they have wronged during the prior year (if they have not already done so). During Yom Kippur itself, Jews fast and pray for God's forgiveness for the transgressions they have made.

The Statesman - The New Statesman, an award winning current affairs magazine, UK version of Time Magazine from USA

Proust - born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris's then-rustic 16th arrondissement) during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
Proust had a close relationship with his mother and was one of the first European novelists to treat homosexuality openly and at length.

Sartre – Jean-Paul – French philosopher who developed the idea of existentialism
In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world.

Namier – right wing British historian and politician – Namier's family were secular-minded Jewish gentry. Namier migrated to the United Kingdom in 1906 and during World War I he held positions with the Propaganda Department of the Foreign Office.
He is best known for his work on the Parliament of Great Britain and its composition in the latter part of the 18th century. Namier's best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, England in the Age of the American Revolution and the History of Parliament series. Namier used Prosopography or collective biography of every Member of Parliament (MP) and peer who sat in the British Parliament in the latter 18th century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often determined how parliamentarians voted.

“The open road, the dusty highway, …” - Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, line is said by Toad as he is trying to convince Ratty and Mole to join him in his latest craze of caravanning. Poop! Poop!

Gerunds - sometimes called "verbal nouns". When a verb ends in -ing, it may be a gerund or a present participle. "Fishing is fun" is a gerund. "Anthony is fishing" is the present participle.

The Spectator - A political magazine which generally takes a conservative viewpoint

Black Magic - brand of dark chocolates.

They are famous for their TV commercials and the line: "Who knows the secret of the Black Magic Box."

Architects: Christopher Wren, Hawksmore and Richard Rogers -
Sir Christopher Wren was born in Wiltshire, England in 1632. London's Great Fire of 1666 gave Wren a chance to present a scheme to rebuild the city. Utopian in concept, it was only partially realized and includes St paul's Cathedral.
Nicholas Hawksmoor was a British architect born to a humble family in Nottinghamshire.
Richard Rogers is a British architect noted for his modernist and functionalist designs. He was born in Florence in 1933 and his significant buildings include Centre Georges Pompidou, Lloyd's Building, Millennium Dome, National Assembly for Wales, European Court of Human Rights

Mozart, Tippett, Bruckner -
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Austrian composer and child prodigy.
Sir Michael Tippett was one of the foremost English composers of the 20th century.
Anton Bruckner's genius did not appear until well into the fourth decade of his life. Furthermore, broad fame and acceptance did not come until he was over 60.

"Turner, then, or Ingres." - J. M. W. Turner was an English painter in the Romantic movement. Jean Ingres was a French painter working in the 1880s.

"About suffering they were never wrong..." - Musée des Beaux Arts, W. H. Auden.

"Breaking bread with the dead, sir. That's what we do." - from the statement "Art is breaking bread with the dead", by W. H. Auden.

“It’s a Sin“ - Hit song by the Pet Shop Boys: Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant.

The song is an implicit rejection of Tennant's Catholic upbringing and education at St Cuthbert's High School in Newcastle upon Tyne, where Tennant claims to have been the victim of homophobic bullying. The song uses extensive samples from Latin masses (specifically, Tennant reciting a part of the Confiteor).

“Finish, good lady, the bright day is done and we are for the dark.” - Antony and Cleopatra Act V Sc 2, William Shakespeare.