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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Friedrich Nietzsche

 

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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche : 

'"One advantage of leaving school at an early age is that one can study subjects of your own choice", wrote Frank Argent, son of a Camberwell labourer. Taking advantage of the public library and early Penguins, he ranged all over the intellectual landscape: Freudian psychology, industrial administration, English literature, political history, Blake, Goethe, Mill,Nietzsche, The Webbs, Bertrand Russell's Essays in Scepticism, and Spengler's "The Decline of the West".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Frank Argent      Print: Book

  

Friedrich von Nietzsche : 

[Bill Naughton was hurt that when he applied for conscientious objector status the tribunal was suspicious of his elevated vocabulary] '"I couldn't help feeling hurt", Naughton recalled, "that they should deny one the right to use the English language". That hit both ethnic and class nerves: he had been born in County Mayo of peasant stock. At any rate, he was using the language to read Locke, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Marx and The Faerie Queene. They were not easy to decipher at first, but as he pieced together an understanding of what he was reading, he became more critical and less deferential...'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Bill Naughton      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : 

'Taxi driver Herbert Hodge...knew that years on the dole only produced apathy, and that out-of-work men wanted practical help in dealing with the Board of Guardians far more than ideology. That experience plus his eclectic reading (Bergson, Nietzsche, William McDougall, Bertrand Russell, the new Testament, and Herbert Spencer as well as Marx) led him out of the [Communist] Party towards a socialism that would be brought about by individual volition...'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Herbert Hodge      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : [unknown]

'[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

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : The Twilight of the Idols

[Muir undertook 'intense study of Nietzsche'] "I tried, when I came to Nietzsche's last works, 'The Twilight of the Idols' and 'Ecce Homo', to ignore the fact that they were tinged with madness... I adopted the watchword of 'intellectual honesty', and in its name committed every conceivable sin against honesty of feeling and honesty in the mere perception of the world... my Nietzscheanism was what psychologists call a 'compensation'. I ccould not face my life as it was, and so I took refuge in the fantasy of the Superman".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : Ecce Homo

[Muir undertook 'intense study of Nietzsche'] "I tried, when I came to Nietzsche's last works, 'The Twilight of the Idols' and 'Ecce Homo', to ignore the fact that they were tinged with madness... I adopted the watchword of 'intellectual honesty', and in its name committed every conceivable sin against honesty of feeling and honesty in the mere perception of the world... my Nietzscheanism was what psychologists call a 'compensation'. I ccould not face my life as it was, and so I took refuge in the fantasy of the Superman".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : [unknown]

'The poet Clare Cameron, born Winifred Wells to a London blacksmith, was a 15s a week clerk given to artistic ecstasies... She ate cheap lunches at Lyons to save money for volumes of Tennyson, Shelley and Ruskin. She found the "kindling glow" of words and ideas in Tolstoy, Shaw, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Marx... Once she read Murger's novel and saw Puccini's opera, she could not turn back: "Ah, THERE was the life we craved. There was expression of and answer to all our fumbling desires and half-formed dreams"...At her first Bohemian party (it was actually in St John's Wood) she was dazzled and intimidated by the easy conversation, the poise, the confidence, the wit'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Clare Cameron      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : [unknown]

'I often found peace in the pages of Ecclesiastes or Isaiah, or in the writings of men whom Barry has described as the heralds of revolt - John Inglesant, George Eliot, Carlyle, Heine, Loti, Nietzsche, etc. But in time even literature palls.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?]      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Nietzsche : [unknown]

'Nietzsche is one of the very few philosophers who remain poets in the midst of their philosophising; perhaps he is the only one. His words are often as near to actual living as it is possible for words to be - they are very nearly made of flesh. Often, when reading Nietzsche, one feels as if one were on a high hill in a bright windy day; we are always aware of action, space and an atmosphere which is best rendered by the word "caller". We may call Nietzsche's philosophy pantomimic - every word is a bold gesture, a moment in a noble dance.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: William Soutar      Print: Book

 

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