Listings for Reader:
Ralph Glasser
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[n/a] : Who's Who
'I spent hours, days, in the great Reading Room of the Mitchell Library. Young as I was, in my ragged shorts, frayed jersey and ill-fitting jacket, incongruous among the sleek, well-nourished university students, I became so familiar to the staff that they dubbed me, in kindly fashion, "the young professor". One day, perhaps as a piece of sympathetic magic, I looked up Einstein's massive entry in "Who's Who" and copied it out word for word, his universities, degrees, honorary doctorates, publications. I kept that transcript pasted into an exercise book, a talisman'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[unknown] : [unknown]
'I spent hours, days, in the great Reading Room of the Mitchell Library. Young as I was, in my ragged shorts, frayed jersey and ill-fitting jacket, incongruous among the sleek, well-nourished university students, I became so familiar to the staff that they dubbed me, in kindly fashion, "the young professor". One day, perhaps as a piece of sympathetic magic, I looked up Einstein's massive entry in "Who's Who" and copied it out word for word, his universities, degrees, honorary doctorates, publications. I kept that transcript pasted into an exercise book, a talisman'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[n/a] : [announcement of Einstein talk]
'A few weeks before my fourteenth birthday I read that Einstein was coming to Glasgow to address the university, and made up my mind to go and listen to him'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Unknown
[n/a] : Encyclopaedia Britannica
'After I left school, the Mitchell became if possible even more important. I read widely, indiscriminately: the lives of the great philosophers and scientists, history and ideas, particularly of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, logic. It was a halting progress, for at every step I had to make up for lack of background, of facts, of definitions, of words, and buried my nose in dictionaries and the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", which led of course to more and more sideways reading.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[n/a] : [dictionaries]
'After I left school, the Mitchell became if possible even more important. I read widely, indiscriminately: the lives of the great philosophers and scientists, history and ideas, particularly of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, logic. It was a halting progress, for at every step I had to make up for lack of background, of facts, of definitions, of words, and buried my nose in dictionaries and the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", which led of course to more and more sideways reading.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[unknown] : [books of biography, history, philosophy, etc]
'After I left school, the Mitchell became if possible even more important. I read widely, indiscriminately: the lives of the great philosophers and scientists, history and ideas, particularly of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, logic. It was a halting progress, for at every step I had to make up for lack of background, of facts, of definitions, of words, and buried my nose in dictionaries and the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", which led of course to more and more sideways reading.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[n/a] : [newspaper reports on Russia]
'Press reports from Russia had an unreal quality, suggesting that observers did not dare believe the horror thinly concealed in what they saw. Enough filtered through.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Newspaper
[unknown] : [acceptance letter from Oxford University]
'I found the letter when I got home about seven in the evening. While I read it I bolted my teas as usual. Then I read it again, a message from a distant planet, with its strange, sonorous, processional language. "Willing to come into residence": you didn't go and stay, you went into [italics] residence [end italics]!'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Letter
[n/a] : [inscriptions at the Bodleian library]
'I went into the grey monastic quad of the Bodleian, the Old School quad, and read the legend in gold above each doorway, Scola Mathematica, Schola Physica - the sovereign estates of the mind laid out as on a chart'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Graffito
John Wilkes : Essay on Woman
'There was Hamish, confirmed practical joker, who donned stage make-up and a false beard and, pretending serious research, persuaded a member of the Bodleian staff to bring him John Wilkes's "Essay on Woman" - a work so scandalous that it was on the restricted access list - and copied it out for [itaklics] zamizdat [end italics] circulation among a select few: "Awake my Fanny, leave all meaner things, This morn shall show what rapture swiving brings..." I accepted a copy, on several sheets of smudged carbon, and for many weeks hid it in the lining of my trunk, expecting that at any moment, in some fateful fashion, the sin would proclaim itself'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Unknown
[unknown] : [unknown]
'For most of my first term I rose at [5 a.m.] and bathed and shaved and dressed, and read till breakfast time - until neighbours compained about the noise I made in the echoing ablutions, when I ran a bath or flushed the toilet and sometimes, forgetfully, strolled about whistling'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[unknown] : [a girl's diary]
'One day, alone for a moment in a girl's room in Lady Margaret Hall - she had gone to fetch a tea-pot from along the corridor - I saw that she had left her diary open, it seemed deliberately, and I saw my name and the words "he is a glorious young animal!"'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Codex
George Orwell : Road to Wigan Pier, The
'I marvelled that "The Road to Wigan Pier", to me naive, had made such a stir. I could think of nothing in it that was not obvious, but when I said so in the Cole Group it was as if I had uttered a mortal heresy'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
G.D.H. Cole : [unknown]
'I had worshipped Cole on the printed page, and my first sight of him in the flesh was fittingly magical.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Lilian Glasser : [letters]
'In my sisters' letters, reading between the lines, I found a self-justifying resentment, the accusation - mystifying to me - that it was I who was guilty of severing the vital links, when in truth it was [italics] they [end italics] who had done so long ago when I was a small child'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Letter
Rachel : [letters from Glasser's aunt]
'I read the letters [from Aunt Rachel] again and again as I strode furiously across the Parks, and the wind threw tears cold against my face. Often, reading her carefully rounded copperplate English - learnt at night school long ago - I heard again the words she had uttered through tears when I first told her of the scholarship: "If only your mother could have been spared to see you turn out like this..."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Letter
Mr Glasser : [letters to his son, Ralph]
'Father's brief lines were full of a sombre perplexity only too familiar. Indirectly, however, they carried a special shock, for to my amazement I had difficulty deciphering the words. He wrote in Yiddish, and following the common practice used the Hebrew cursive script. As a child I had learned to read and write Hebrew and Yiddish fluently; now the knowledge was fading fast.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Letter
[unknown] : [Romantic texts and works about Romanticism]
'I was intensely interested in the Romantics at this time, that explosion of creative thought so inadequately explained in reading and in lectures. We talked of French and German poetry'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[unknown] : [German poetry]
'I read German poetry with the aged, charming Fraulein Wuschack, sometime governess in the Kaiser's family'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Pierre Ronsard : Sonnets pour Helene
'With Mademoiselle Fleury that morning I had been struck by some lines in Ronsard's "Sonnets pour Helene", bittersweet, barbed, that drove home a feeling I had recognised and resisted long before, a sense of the intransigent flux of life, unappeasable in the midst of sweetness - intimations of mortality, of transient triumph. I tried out the thought on Bill: "Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir, a la chandelle, Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous emerveillant, Ronsard me celebrait du temps que j'etais belle".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Rachel : [letter]
'Towards the end of the war I would receive a letter in her tiny, rounded hand, one of those wartime "pre-mission" letters, intended for onward transmission only if the writer did not return. Two sentences in particular would burn into my mind, and whenever I thought of them I would hear her voice in my head: "You suffer because you are the man you are. I did not always know how to give you the understanding you need."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Manuscript: Letter
[unknown] : [citation for bravery]
'The next I learned of him [his old friend Alec] was some time after D-Day, when I read the posthumous citation'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Unknown
Victor Gollancz : "Let my people go": some practical proposals for dealing with Hitler's massacre of the Jews
'In all seriousness he [Victor Gollancz] could flaunt a prophetic grandeur, or perhaps simply uncontrolled showmanship, which would have been comic in less traumatic contexts: for instance, in the title of his pamphlet on the Nazi brutality to Jews, apostrophising not only Hitler but all other rulers - "Let my People Go" - words befitting a Moses, not a Gollancz'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser
R.G. Collingwood : Speculum Mentis, or the Map of Knowledge
'An exception [to the intellectual triviality Glasser found at Oxford], far from generously recognised, was R.G. Collingwood in his luminous exposition of the proper business of philosophical enquiry, in lectures and in the Olympian sweep of his book "Speculum Mentis". Its opening sentences I would remember in all the years to come: "All thought exists for the sake of action. We try to understand ourselves and the world only in order that we may learn how to live".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[n/a] : [Oxford Finals Class Lists]
'In the dimness I had missed - how could I have done! - a few lines of crabbed writing at the very top of the paper, separated from those below by a blank space and a thick black line. Under a heading "The following were judged worthy of Distinction", were three names; mine was there.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Poster
Harold Joseph Laski : [unknown]
'When fairly launched into a subject, especially in a formal lecture in his favourite field, French political thought, these disquieting elements faded; and words and cadences flowed elegantly, engaging the imagination like themes in a romantic symphony - something not always present, alas, in his writing, which tended to be involuted and tantalisingly diffuse, defects of his supreme quality, a widely sweeping, impatient mind'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Harold Joseph Laski : [unknown]
'Writing on liberty, arguing that its attainment was an inborn duty, he said that in order to divine its proper use one must "Listen to the still, small voice within you." The image was not original. Poe, among others, had used it; and in Laski's usage it expressed the world view of the Philosophes. Still, it was an engaging one, despite its naive assumption that clear sight, and goodwill, resided eternally in the noble savage within us - if we would only set him free'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
[unknown] : [poems]
'A colleague at the Council, later to achieve distinction as a poet, sent me a copy of his first slim volume of verse with a note: "This is to get you into trouble with the secret police!" A characteristic irony, for the poems were far from subversive; the reference, I think, was rather to what he [italics] could [end italics] have written but had suppressed'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Olivia Manning : Balkan Trilogy, The
'Reggie Smith, also a producer at the BBC, was married to the novelist Olivia Manning. She was to draw him with exquisite accuracy, and some bitterness, as Guy in her series of novels, The Balkan trilogy - schoolboy innocence, unthinking cruelty, shallow enthusiasms, superficially generous-spirited and outgoing but essentially egotistical, a mixture of coldness and an insatiable need for warmth'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
:
'There, on warm weekend days, I would sit and read in a peaceful arbour where trees and shrubbery muffled the noise of traffic'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Luigi Illica : [libretto of 'La Boheme]
'The music of "La Boheme" having taken special hold of me, I read the libretto in the Mitchell Library, and as much as I could find about Murger and his world, and the people he knew who lived on black coffee and little else in romantic Paris, and was saddened and perplexed by the opera's alloy of sordidness and sentimentality'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Henry Murger : Scenes de la Vie de Boheme
'The music of "La Boheme" having taken special hold of me, I read the libretto in the Mitchell Library, and as much as I could find about Murger and his world, and the people he knew who lived on black coffee and little else in romantic Paris, and was saddened and perplexed by the opera's alloy of sordidness and sentimentality'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book
Tom : Eyes of Adonis
'[Tom, an Oxford contemporary] Following an elite fashion among moneyed aesthetes, he published, privately, a slim volume of poems on thick hand-made paper - "Eyes of Adonis". Some of the poems were little more than doggerel, and he was hurt to find that he could not even [italics] give [end italics] the little books away'.
