Bernard Gilbert

“Bernard Lewis, a lifelong student of Jews and Islam and himself a Jew, reflected on the fourteen centuries of Jewish life under Islamic rule, eight centuries after Maimonides’ damning verdict. Lewis wrote: ‘The Jews were never free from discrimination, but only rarely subject to persecution.’ He noted that the situation of Jews living under Islamic rulers was ‘never as bad as in Christendom at its worst, nor ever as good as in Christendom at its best.’ Lewis observed that ‘there is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust.’ But he also commented that, on the other hand, there was nothing in the history of Jews under Islam ‘to compare with the progressive emancipation and acceptance accorded to Jews in the democratic West during the last three centuries.’11””

“First colonized by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1583, St John’s has ever since been an important outpost of the Americas. Home port of the vast Grand Banks cod fishing fleet, it was here, on Signal Hill, that Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless message in 1901, and from here Alcock and Brown took off to make the first non-stop transatlantic flight in 1919.””

“The gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall;I tie the noose on in a knowing wayAs one that knots his necktie for a ball;But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After allI think I will not hang myself to-day. To-morrow is the time I get my pay--My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--I see a little cloud all pink and grey--Perhaps the rector's mother will not call-- I fancy that I heard from Mr. GallThat mushrooms could be cooked another way--I never read the works of Juvenal--I think I will not hang myself to-day.The world will have another washing-day;The decadents decay; the pedants pall;And H.G. Wells has found that children play,And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,Rationalists are growing rational--And through thick woods one finds a stream astraySo secret that the very sky seems small--I think I will not hang myself to-day. EnvoiPrince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;Even to-day your royal head may fall,I think I will not hang myself to-day.””