A city upon a hill

"We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. - John Winthrop on the Arbella, April 1630

I have now seeing Boston, Licolnshire, realised the irony of this. Neither Boston, Lincs nor Mass are set upon a literal hill.

Dawkins the theologian

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. - Terry Eagleton, review of The God Delusion

The lamps are going out

A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week — he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time." - Viscount Grey of Fallodon, "Twenty-Five Years 1892-1916" (New York, 1925)