The Carpenters: Close to You TV - Frederick Engels - Waldemar Januszczak - John Howard - The Guardian - Nelson Mandela - Ben Jonson - Henry Louis Gates - Leo Strasberg - Ronald Reagan - Charles Spencer - Citizen Kane 1941 - Heinrich Himmler - Voltaire - Alan Bleasdale TV - Killing Eve TV - Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy TV - Guy Walters TV - Brian May TV - Simon Schama TV - Game of Thrones TV -
She is very much alive in our minds and in our hearts. The Carpenters, Close to You ***** Richard’s eulogy
My sister happened to be one of the finest female singers who ever lived … The world misses her. ibid.
Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion and art; and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of life and consequently the degree of economic development ... form the foundation upon which the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved ... instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case. Frederick Engels, graveside tribute to Karl Marx
For Marx was, before all else, a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat. ibid.
Bernini: as architect, as sculpture, as painter, the man could do everything. Waldemar Januszczak, Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s I, BBC 2013
Ronald Reagan in my view was the greatest of post-World War II American presidents. John Howard, Australian prime minister
He somehow embodied a symbolic British reaction to the whirlpool of the modern world, endlessly perplexed by the dizzying and incoherent pattern of events but doing his courteous best to ensure that resentment never showed. The Guardian, obituary leading article re John le Mesurier
He knew when to compromise. Yet he never compromised his principles. He was a militant. Yet a militant who knew how to plan, assess concrete situations and emerge with rational solutions to problems. Nelson Mandela’s eulogy for Joe Slovo 15 January 1995
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years thou’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ’scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much. Ben Jonson, On My First Son
Mama and I would go to a funeral and she’d stand up to read the dead person’s eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh. Henry Louis Gates
The dream of her talent, which she had nurtured as a child, was not a mirage. Leo Strasberg, re Marilyn Monroe
I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them. Ronald Reagan
Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. Charles Spencer, re Diana
Legendary was Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida’s Xanadu, world’s largest private pleasure ground. Here, on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu’s mountain. Contents of Xanadu’s palace: paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many another palace – a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised, enough for ten museums – the loot of the world. Xanadu’s livestock: the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the beast of the field and jungle. Two of each, the biggest private zoo since Noah. Like the pharaohs, Xanadu’s landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave. Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself. Here in Xanadu last week, Xanadu’s landlord was laid to rest, a potent figure of our century, America’s Kubla Khan – Charles Foster Kane. Citizen Kane 1941 starring Orson Welles & Joseph Cotten & Everett Sloane & Dorothy Comingore & Agnes Moorehead & Ruth Warrick & Ray Collins & William Alland & Paul Stewart & Philip van Zandt et al, director Orson Welles, newsreel
Whatever actions he took he carried them out as a National Socialist and an SS man, from the very bottom of his heart and through his blood, he carried out felt and understood Adolf Hitler’s world vision. Heinrich Himmler, funeral eulogy
Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die. Voltaire
We’re all here today not to send George to a better place or a Judgment Day or to worry about our own going but to remember his life. And curse the fact that he’s not here. He was a good man. He was the best man I ever knew. Alan Bleasdale, Boys From the Black Stuff: George’s Last Ride, Chrissie stands up in church, BBC 1982
Eve: Oh, God, no!
Frank: … loud man. He was a good man. Patient. Hard working. A man who had time for everybody.
Eve: No he didn’t. Killing Eve s1e4: Sorry Baby, BBC 2018
Thomas Hardy: The Wessex Novels are not one book, but many. They cover an immense stretch; inevitably, they are full of imperfections – some are failures, and others exhibit only the wrong side of the marker’s genius. But undoubtedly, when we have submitted ourselves fully to them, when we come to take stock of our impression of the whole, the effect is commanding and satisfactory. We have been freed from the cramp and pettiness of life. Our imaginations have been stretched and heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul. Virginia Woolf
He was this very intelligent, intense young lawyer, and she was an au pair. But she had a very good brain. Serge opened up Beate’s eyes to what happened during the war. And their life since then has been one long very very hardly fought campaign against injustice. Guy Walters, re Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, cited Nazi Hunters
A priceless treasure that can never be replaced. Brian May re Patrick Moore, Sky News 9th December 2012
And you’d find women – articulate, intelligent and impassioned. And among those women the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft. She was the Spirit of the Times. Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e1: Forces of Nature, BBC 2002
We are here to say goodbye to our brothers and sisters, to our fathers and mothers, to our friends, our fellow men and women who set aside their differences to fight together and die together so that others might live. Everyone in this world owes them a debt that can never be repaid. It is our duty and our honour to keep them alive in memory for those who come after us and those who come after them for as long as men draw breath. They were the shields that guarded the realms of men and we shall never see their like again. Game of Thrones s8e4: The Last of the Starks, Jon Snow, HBO 2019