Cherwell

Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 479:

The less amiable sides of Lindemann’s character were shielded at Chartwell, but were often on full display in Oxford. His professorial fellowship was in Wadham, but he thought that Christ Church was more suitable to his status, and contrived to live there for nearly forty years. He was a notable but cantankerous member of the common room. When he stood as an independent Conservative candidate (his views on issues other than the menace of Nazism were well to the right of Churchill’s) at a 1937 bye-election for one of the University seats he was heavily defeated. He was taken into Whitehall by Churchill in 1939, and was made a peer by him in 1941, assuming the grandly riparian name of Cherwell. This led to a mocking piece of Oxford satirical verse, circa 1945, which started: ‘Long, long ago when first the war began, Lord Cherwell was just plain Professor Lindemann’.

The Evolution of Grievances

An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers.

Anthony Trollope, The Warden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; 1855), p. 105-6.

Who is Rushing In?

From Horace's Satires (I.2.24):

dum vitant stulti vitia in contraria currunt

fools rushing to avoid one fault, rush to the opposite extreme

Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace, Serm. I.2.27-28:

But why all this? I'll tell ye, ’tis my Theme:
‘Women and Fools are always in Extreme.’

Scire tuum

                                  o mores, usque adeone
scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?
 
O mores! Does your knowledge count for nothing then, unless others know you know it?

Persius, I.26-27. My translation. I recognize the irony of sharing this here, in a public account of my reading and observations of nature.