'Emrys Daniel Hughes, [an] imprisoned CO and son of a Tonypandy miner, learned that the authorities were not unaware of the subversive potential of great literature. Following a Home Office directive to examine prisoners' books, the chaplain confiscated a volume of Shelley, though not before Hughes had a chance to read and discuss it. The padre also apparently removed Tristram Shandy from the prison library: Hughes found it whilst cleaning the chaplain's rookm and had read it on the sly... In More's Utopia he discovered a radical rethinking of criume and punishment. The World Set Free, in which HG Wells predicted the devastation of nuclear war, naturally spoke to his antiwar activism, and he was greatly impressed by the Quaker idealism in George Fox's journal, a biography of William Penn and Walt Whitman's poems.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Emrys Daniel Hughes Print: Book
The seventeenth-century waterman-poet John Taylor had read More's Utopia, Plato's Republic, Montaigne, and Cervantes in translation, but he never mastered a foreign language and he relentlessly satirised latinate prose:
I ne'er used Accidence so much as now,
Nor all these Latin words here interlaced
I do not know if they with sense are placed,
I in the book did find them".'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: John Taylor Print: Book
'Slept all morning, then read quite a lot of "Utopia" in afternoon, & really it is very interesting (once you get over the spelling), & he had some very advanced ideas.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
'Settled down to 3 hours solid slogging at "Utopia", & got it read & notes begun. Spent evening finishing "England their England", which I loved - it's most clever & interesting.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
'These artless idealists had their favourite authors, which I now proceeded to read...Their piece de resistance was Sir Thomas More's "Utopia", closely followed by the prose works of William Morris, "The Story of the Unknown Church", and the like. There was quite a spate of novels with this ideology, but the only one that has come down to the present day is Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Stamper Print: Book
'and then up and to my chamber with a good fire and there spent an hour on Morly's "Introduction to Music", a very good but inmethodical book.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'Read the Utopia - Write - S reads Henry VI aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'Finish the Utopia'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'I had lent him "An Account of Scotland, in 1702," written by a man of various enquiry, an English chaplain to a regiment stationed there. JOHNSON. "It is sad stuff, Sir, miserably written, as books in general then were. There is now an
elegance of style universally diffused. No man now writes so ill as Martin's "Account of the Hebrides" is written, A man could not write so ill, if he should try. Set a merchant's clerk now to write, and he'll do better".'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Johnson Print: Book
'Read Sir T. More in evening'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Ruskin Print: Book
