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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
'Ewan McColl remembered his father, a Communist ironfounder, as someone who was always giving him secondhand books. He "belonged to the generation who believed that books were tools that could open a lock which would free people..." At age eight McColl received the works of Darwin. By fifteen he had read Gogol, Dostoevsky and the entire Human Comedy: "They were a refuge from the horrors of the life around us... Unemployment in the 1930s was unbelievable, you really felt you'd never escape... So books for me were a kind of fantasy life... For me to go at the age of fourteen, to drop into the library and discover a book like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four-Sided Figure... the titles alone produced a kind of happiness in me... When I discovered Gogol in that abominable translation of Constance Garnett with those light blue bindings... I can remember the marvellous sensation of sitting in the library and opening the volume and going into that world of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin in The Overcoat or in The Nose, or The Madman's Diary. I thought I'd never read anything so marvellous, and through books I was living in many worlds simultaneously. I was living in St Petersburg and in Paris with Balzac... And I knew all the characters, Lucien de Rubempre and Rastignac as though they were my own friends".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ewan McColl Print: Book
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
'[Aneurin Bevan] burrowed through the Tredegar Workmen's Institute Library, and acquired his characteristically grandiose vocabulary through close study of Roget's Thesaurus... When he chaired the Tredegar Library Committee, ?60 of its ?300 acquisitions budget was delegated to a colliery repairman to buy philosophy books. Bevan could quote Nietzsche, discuss F.H. Bradley's "Appearance and Reality", and deeply impress an Oxford tutor with his crique of Kant's "Categorical Imperative"... Bevan was... deeply influenced by "The Theory of the Leisure Class".'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Aneurin (Nye) Bevan Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
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Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
'At Maidstone, both on this occasion and subsequently when I served several months in separate confinement as a convict preparatory to going to Parkhurst, I was able, through the chaplain's kindness, to study not only Greek philosophy, but also Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Fechner, Lotze, etc. Being a very rapid reader and having some ability in getting at the gist of a book I got through a fair amount of really interesting reading. ... In the summer I grabbed a book as soon as it was light enough to read, say, four o'clock, read till and during breakfast, dinner, supper and continued till 9:30 or 10 o'clock at night, an average of 8 to 10 hours a day. There were times, of course, when the burden of prison life bred a spirit of discontent and restlessness which books could not assuage.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
'Kant's Geografica Fisica'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'Finish the 1st Vol of Geografica Fisica'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'read - Jacopo Ortis - 2nd Vol of Geographica Fisica - &c &c'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'I have myself read his [Kant's] works, and I think nothing can be more lucid than his style, or more easy to be understood'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charlotte Bury Print: Book
'You will never in the world guess what sort of a pastime I have had resourse to in this windbound portion of my voyage. Nothing less than the reading of Kant's Transcendental Philosophy! So it is: I am at the hundred and fiftieth page of the Kritik der reinen verbubft; not only reading but partially understanding, and full of projects for instructing my benighted countrymen on the true merits of this sublime system at some more propitious season.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Carlyle Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Thursday 11 March 1819:
'Rose at 7. Breakfasted, and read Kant for a couple of hours [...] finished the evening with Kant.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Thursday 11 March 1819:
'Rose at 7. Breakfasted, and read Kant for a couple of hours [...] finished the evening with Kant.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Saturday 13 March 1819:
'Rose at 1/2 past 7, after a sleepless night. Read some of Hume's Essay on the Academical
Philosophy [...] Between 4 and 5 read some more of Kant.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Monday 22 March 1819:
'Rose at 6 [...] Read some of Kant for 1 hour ...] between 4 and 5 read some more of Kant;
began to acquire a better idea of his doctrines than I had before [...] read Kant until 1/2
past 7, when I went to the "Crown and Anchor" to hear Coleridge's Lecture.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Wednesday 24 March 1819:
'Rose soon after 6. Read Kant, and breakfasted, until 9.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Thursday 25 March 1819:
'Between 4 and 5 I read some of Kant's Prolegomena [...] went up to Palsgrave Place; drank tea
with [Charles] Cameron; we conversed about Kant, and read some of Bentham upon Legislation.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Friday 26 March 1819:
'Rose at 6. Read and meditated Kant for some time [...] attempted to read some Kant in the
evening, but found my eyes so weak that I was compelled to desist, and to think without book.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
From George Grote's diary, kept for his fiancee Harriet Lewin, Friday 26 March 1819:
'Rose at 6. Read and meditated Kant for some time [...] attempted to read some Kant in the
evening, but found my eyes so weak that I was compelled to desist, and to think without book.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
George Grote to G. C. Lewis, September 1840:
'Since you departed from London, I have been reading some of Kant's "Kritik der reinen
Vernunft," a book which always leads me into very instructive trains of metaphysical thought,
and which I value exceedingly, though I am far from agreeing in all he lays down. I have also
been looking into Plato's "Timaeus" and "Parmenides," and some of Locke, and have been
writing down some of the thoughts generated in my mind by this philosophical melange.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: George Grote Print: Book
