Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logi...cal process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the p...eople of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. Th...e word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »