May-June 2007 > Montage

Chapter and Verse

Chapter & Verse

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

~Who proclaimed that photography is to painting as water is to wine?

~Who protested, “They have taken away all our liberties—now they have given us jury trials!”?

Stephen Oresman seeks a source and precise wording for military advice allegedly given by the Duke of Wellington to a young subaltern: “Eat, sleep, and defecate at every available opportunity.”

“mediocre” (March-April). Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations (see “Harvard in Epigram,” January-February, page 84), offers two variants: “Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs” (Max Beerbohm, in the Saturday Review [November 5, 1904]) and “Only a mediocre writer is always at his best” (in W. Somerset Maugham’s introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker [1944]).

 

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