Like other theological disputes, the authorship dispute is over origins: Where did these works come from? What circumstances, influences, and qualities of mind made them possible? What was this genius from which they emanated? Seeing the origin of the works in the man from Stratford, traditionalists are, in the terminology of the dispute, Stratfordians—defenders of the faith; orthodox believers in the one true church. The heretics banging their ninety-five theses against the church door are anti-Stratfordians—against Stratford as the origin—but their quest for truth has splintered them into sects, sometimes warring but loosely affiliated under the sign of their dissent from orthodoxy: Baconians, Marlovians, Oxfordians, Sidneyans, Nevillians, and others, each named according to their god.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

It is impossible to deny the inconceivable influence that military glory exercises upon the spirit of a nation. General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to be the head of their government, is a man of violent temper and very moderate talents; nothing in his whole career ever proved him qualified to govern a free people; and, indeed, the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always opposed him. But he was raised to the Presidency, and has been maintained there, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained, twenty years ago, under the walls of New Orleans; a victory which was, however, a very ordinary achievement and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Loos lived in New York City for a while, making a starvation living as a freelance music critic for one of New York's many German-language papers, the New Yorker Bannerträger. Before leaving Europe, a wise old man had advised him that whenever Americans asked whether he could do this or that, he should instantly reply, with a beaming smile, "Why yes, of course, that's my specialty!" Loos had asked for work from the Bannerträger, but it was only when the paper's regular music critic suddenly got a new job that the paper's desperate editor turned to young Loos. Did Loos know anything about the "Great Melba," the fabulously popular Australian soprano Nellie Melba? Or Carmen, the opera she was starring in? "Of course," Loos responded, "that's my specialty!" The skeptical editor had no choice; he handed Loos a standing-room-only ticket and sent him off to review melba's performance.

Loos had never written a music review in his life. He frantically ran off to the public library and read every review he could get his hands on. He began to memorize what he assumed were the key terms: "counterpoint"; "dynamic"; "crescendo"; "after three hours," he later wrote, "I knew enough."

Then he dashed off to the Metropolitan Opera, where he met a friend. The friend was actually a minor player in the opera, a soldier, but tonight the opera was short of soldiers, did Loos know anything about Soldiering? Marching and so on? "Why yes," Loos replied, "that's my specialty!" So the opera hired him on the spot, dressed him up in a soldier suit, and marched him on stage. That, Loos joked, was the time he appeared on stage with the great Melba.

But he still had his review to write. He dashed home and packed it with all the disjointed jargon that he had memorized; the paper printed it as written. His roommate thought it was a spoof and laughed uproariously; Loos was terrified that someone would actually read it. The next morning (so Loos told the story), another German-language paper, the New Yorker Staatzeitung, reported that its rival, the Bannerträger, had published a hilarious satire of a music review. The 'Bannerträger's regular reviewer was awful, the Staatzeitung wrote, but the new satirist was terrific! And later (Loos swore) the New York Music Critics Association made him an honorary member!

—Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna

It was in reference to this eulogy on Cromwell that Waller made to King Charles II the reply found in Bayle's dictionary. The King, to whom Waller had just presented, according to the custom of kings and poets, a poem stuffed with praise, reproached him with having done better for Cromwell. Waller replied: "Sir, we poets succeed better in fiction than in truth." That answer was not so sincere as the one made by the Dutch ambassador who, when the same king complained that people had less respect for him than for Cromwell, said, "Ah, sir, that Cromwell was something else again."

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

While at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille's marriage to another. "In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die." Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady's maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets "two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum." While awaiting the departure of the diligence he "rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog." Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a "'Ha!' so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller." But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there "the twenty happiest days" of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

 Chateaubriand's life according to Lemaître was a "magnificent series of attitudes."

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

Did anyone ever see Washington naked? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine was born with his clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture

Liszt was unanimously adopted as speaker. When the first toast was called, he rose and in the name of the whole company addressed me for a full quarter of an hour with a warmth of feeling, a wealth of ideas and a turn of phrase that many orators would envy. I was deeply touched. Unhappily, if he spoke well, he drank likewise. The fatal cup set such tides of champagne flowing that all Liszt's eloquence was shipwrecked in it. Belloni and I were still reasoning with him in the street at two in the morning, and urging on him the advisability of waiting until daylight before engaging in single combat with pistols at two yards' range with a Bohemian who had drunk even better than he. When daylight came we felt somewhat anxious for Liszt, who was giving a concert at noon. At half-past eleven he was still asleep. They finally woke him; he climbed into a carriage, arrived at the hall, entered to a triple-barreled broadside of applause, sat down, and played as I do not believe he has ever played in his life. Verily, there is a God . . . for pianists.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

Pickering structured his life in Washington as though determined to diminish the possibility that any of his misperceptions might be challenged. He seldom attended social gatherings where Jeffersonians might be present and exchanged views with members of the opposition only on the floor of the Senate. Living at Coyle's was in itself a defense against foreign ideas. There, the little group of embattled Federalists spent evenings by the hearthside reinforcing one another's prejudices.

—Gerald H. Clarfield, Timothy Pickering and the American Republic

When [Napoleon's] carriage arrived in the court of the Tuileries, his valets opened the door and put down the steps with a violence which seemed to say that even inanimate substances were insolent when they retarded his progress for a moment.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

There is this amusing story of the summer visit of Poulenc and Milhaud to Schönberg in the 1920s, when they were having dinner while the children of the dodecaphonic master were playing in the garden. Hardly had the soup tureen been placed on the table than a ball splashed through an open window right into it, generously distributing the contents over the participants, upon which Schönberg with grim humor stated, looking intensely through the vermicelli hanging over his bald scull: “This is what I want to do with musical life.”

—John Borstlap, The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21^st Century

Charles Fourier, a businessman from Lyons, put forward some even more extravagant notions. He predicted the ideal world he was creating would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them an era of Perfect Harmony, during which the North Pole would be milder than the shores of the Mediterranean, the sea, no longer salt, would turn into lemonade, and the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 mathematicians equal to Newton, and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, though he modestly added, “These are approximate estimates.”

—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

Should we never be heard of more, you may conclude that we have been eaten.
 
—Thomas Stamford Raffles, in a letter to the Duchess of Somerset written before his departure to Sumatra, quoted in Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

When [Sir Walter Scott] sold his Edinburgh house as part of the settlement, its wine cellar was loaded into carts and taken to Abbotsford; 350 dozen bottles of port and claret and 35 dozen of spirits were to join a much larger depository, of over 1,000 dozen bottles, at the country mansion.

—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

Colonel Frederick Ponsonby had been cut up by French cavalry sabers and left for dead; he had been speared by a passing Polish lancer; given some brandy by a French officer; piled into a barricade of bodies by retreating French infantry; ridden over and tossed by Prussian cavalry; discovered by a British infantryman who stood guard over him throughout the night, while he felt the air pass in and out of his pierced lung; and finally taken off to a dressing-station at daybreak. He was known as “The Man Who Was Killed at Waterloo,” and spotted twelve years later, as governor of Malta, by Captain Codrington’s daughter, who found him “playing violent games of racquets with as much energy as the young soldiers around him.”
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830

The female poets regarded him as a decayed lion, into whose mouth their heads must be placed in order to prove that he had no teeth.

---——Julian Symons, The Tell-Tale Heart: the Life and Work of Edgar Allan Poe

For the last three decades of his life, Messiaen lived with his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, in an old building in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, in the area of Montmartre. As Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone report in their biography of the composer, the accommodations were fairly Spartan, with one communal bathroom on each floor of the building. The main living quarters were decorated in devout Catholic style, plastic crucifixes all around. When the composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen called on Messiaen, he looked to see what books and records were on the shelves, but could find only a copy of the Bible and various recordings of Messiaen's own works.

No one reported anythinglike a seamy underside to the composer's personality. The conductor Kent Nagano, who collaborated closely with Messiaen in his last years, was once pressed to tell some unflattering or otherwise revealing anecdote about his mentor, and all he had to offer was a story about how Messiaen and Loriod had once devoured an entire pear tart in one sitting.

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

[Roy] Harris was another model New Deal musician. His background might have been dreamed up by Great American Composer central casting: he was born in the oil-boom town of Chandler, Oklahoma, in a log cabin, no less, on Lincoln's birthday.

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Antheil first won fame in postwar Paris, presenting works with such titles as Airplane Sonata and Sonata Sauvage. Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and other modernist writers admired him, although Stravinsky was unimpressed. One concert occasioned a Rite-style riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, although it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for the benefit of the film director marcel L'Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene for his thriller L'Inhumaine.

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

In 1952, [John Cage] scandalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by saying that Beethoven had misled generations of composers by structuring music in goal-oriented harmonic narratives instead of letting it unfold moment by moment. At a New York gathering, he was heard to say, "Beethoven was wrong!" The poet John  Ashberry overheard the remark, and for years afterward wondered what Cage had meant.  Eventually, Ashberry approached Cage again. "I once heard you say something about Beethoven," the poet began, "and I've always wondered—" Cage's eyes lit up. "Beethoven was wrong!" he exclaimed. "Beethoven was wrong!" And he walked away.

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century