Figures of Speech

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations:

I saw the dew lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night.

Stephen Marche reviewing the film Anonymous:

“Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

Michael Ledger-Lomas, reviewing historian Peter Brown's memoir:

The gospels changed Rome’s elites, but less rapidly and fully than Brown had once imagined. They bowed to bishops as protectors of the destitute and lavished riches on the poor—or on the monks who deemed themselves such. But they did so for a startling return: piles of treasure in heaven. It was this mining for eschatological bitcoin that generated the material splendor of medieval Christendom.