Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel
    A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel
    A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel
    Ebook83 pages28 minutes

    A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel

    By David Starkey

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    David Starkey's A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel is a far-ranging and fearless collection, of great humour, intelligence and sympathy. Ranging through philosophy, art and history -- both global and domestic -- these poems skillfully chronicle the darkness that is our current age and condition, and the pinpricks of light thta may show us the way out.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiblioasis
    Release dateApr 15, 2010
    ISBN9781926845142
    A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel
    Author

    David Starkey

    David Starkey is Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and the author of many books including ‘Elizabeth’; ‘Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII’ and ‘Monarchy: England and Her Rulers from the Tudors to the Windsors’. He is a winner of the WH Smith Prize and the Norton Medlicott Medal for Services to History presented by Britain’s Historical Association. He is a well-known TV and radio personality. He was made a CBE in 2007. He lives in London.

    Read more from David Starkey

    Related to A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Get Hooked

      Jul 7, 2021

      Richard J Evans’s three-volume history – The Coming of the Third Reich(2004),The Third Reich in Power (2005) and The Third Reich at War (2008) – offers a definitive account of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The much-acclaimed series explores Hitl

      1 min read

    • Article

      Chasing The American Dream

      Oct 27, 2022

      Chasing The American Dream
      2 min read

    • Article

      Exceeding Expectations

      Nov 23, 2023

      Charles Dickens did not come from a privileged background, but nor were his parents without prospects. John Dickens (1785-1851), was the son of servants to the Crewe family - Cheshire gentry with a townhouse in Mayfair - whose patronage secured him a

      5 min read

    • Article

      Dazed and Confused

      Nov 1, 2021

      Dazed and Confused
      3 min read

    • Article

      SECRETS of SUTTON HOO

      Aug 2, 2019

      SECRETS of SUTTON HOO
      3 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of Genius

      Jun 10, 2021

      Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson Bloomsbury, 512 pages, £25 DH Lawrence has proven to be an endlessly fascinating subject for biographers. There is his working-class upbringing as the son of a collier; the scholarships he won

      1 min read

    • Article

      Tea, Taxes And The Taking Up Of Arms

      Apr 14, 2022

      The Seven Years’ War, fought between several nations including Britain and France, ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. France surrenders its territory in North America and the Caribbean to Britain. One of Britain’s first attempts to defend

      2 min read

    • Article

      Palais Garnier

      Jan 26, 2023

      Palais Garnier
      3 min read

    • Article

      Historical Fiction

      Apr 14, 2022

      Born in the US state of Georgia in 1815, young Yip Tolroy has never spoken a word. As a mute person, he struggles as a friendless outcast but, when he reaches his 15th year, his life changes forever. After committing a terrible crime, Yip is forced t

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Real Housewives Of The Third Reich: Wealth, Power And Petty Rivalries

      Jan 16, 2021

      WHO among us hasn’t felt that schadenfreudian thrill of wondering, “How on Earth can she be married to him?” (Apologies, Ms Chao!) At once superior and voyeuristic, the question assumes that the woman is perfectly nice, even charming, while her husba

      2 min read

    • Article

      Poetry ‘This Bloody War’

      Nov 5, 2019

      Poetry ‘This Bloody War’
      2 min read

    • Article

      Saturday, July 30

      Jul 21, 2022

      Saturday, July 30
      1 min read

    • Article

      Wonder Women

      Nov 5, 2019

      Wonder Women
      7 min read

    • Article

      Formidable Royals

      Aug 12, 2021

      A claimant to the English throne during the Anarchy, a civil war between England and Normandy, Empress Matilda almost became England’s first female ruler. She was the daughter and heir of King Henry I, but after his death the throne was seized by her

      1 min read

    • Article

      The World Of Writing

      Apr 1, 2021

      The World Of Writing
      3 min read

    • Article

      Emily, Rewritten

      Jan 6, 2023

      The most mysterious member of the Brontë family, Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848 at the young age of 30, leaving just one novel, Wuthering Heights, and a collection of poetry as her legacy. Yet, she is still recognised as one of the world’s gre

      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘James Monroe’ Is An Unclouded Look At A Complicated Legacy

      Nov 10, 2020

      Biographers find themselves reckoning with the Founding Fathers’ complicity in slavery – and James Monroe is no exception.

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel - David Starkey

      I. Will

      Q & A: Will

      Q. Did Adam display free will when eating of the Tree of Knowledge?

      A. That depends on whom you ask. Hegel was said to be famously bored by the question. Aquinas, in contrast, could hardly think of anything else. In all his voluminous writings, Aristotle, strangely, seems not to have mentioned the First Man at all.

      Q. Does Aquinas attribute spontaneity or autonomy to the will?

      A. Aquinas is rather too preoccupied by the Almighty to take that tack.

      Q. Have you noticed how frequently Schopenhauer returns to the idea that our individual wills can lead us to the Kantian Ding an Sich?

      A. Yes, he seems to be obsessed by the topic.

      Q. Does Freud use the word will when analyzing voluntary movements in ideo-motor terms?

      A. No, but William James does; he calls this mental picture a kinaesthetic image.

      Q. Do animals have free will?

      A. No, they do not.

      A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel

      It conceives at the mouth. The jack sticks

      its long wet tongue down the doe’s throat.

      A few months later, she gives birth

      through her ears. A kit whelped

      from the right ear will be a buck;

      the left’s a bitch. A group of weasels

      is called a gang. Skilled in medicine,

      they revive their freshly killed young

      with herbs. They carry the dead

      they cannot save on their backs

      and bury them in weasel cemeteries.

      Above all, they stink. The once proud

      basilisk, famed in myth and song,

      became extinct after long exposure

      to the feculence of weasels, a smell

      so foul that Pliny the Elder and Isidore

      of Seville vied with one another

      to describe its stench in epic similes.

      Jamestown

      O America, let us celebrate

      your miserable beginnings: this feeble fort

      thrown up on the banks of a foul, salty river by adventurers hoping to cash in

      on a New World they thought would forfeit

      its treasures as easily as the whores

      of Southwark’s stews surrendered their sweet goods. It didn’t work that way. Gold

      was not forthcoming. Imported vines perished,

      silkworms shriveled. In their damp lean-tos

      the alien men and their few tattered women faced winter and typhoid fever,

      dysentery and sloth. The natives were equally

      unimpressed by the thatch-roofed church

      and the invisible, nugatory god who ruled it.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1