The Weight Of The Evidence Quotes

“Is science the disinterested pursuit of knowledge which the world may apply if it will? Or is it an activity always dependent upon economic and political demands?”
― Michael Innes, The Weight Of The Evidence

“Down the five ill-disposed wings of Nesfield University, vaulted, machine-carved, echoing and damp, surged conflicting columns of adolescent humanity, a rout of jostling automotive sponges hurried from pool to pool of a knowledge codified, timetabled and approved.”
― Michael Innes, The Weight Of The Evidence

“Hobhouse introduced Appleby. Sir David, without budging, extruded so pungent a benevolence that the effect was rather that of coming upn a skunk unawares.”
― Michael Innes, The Weight of the Evidence

“Sir David Evans was a charming old man with philosophic pretensions and a mass of white hair. Because of the philosophy he sat in front of the immense bookcases groaning under Locke, Hartley and Hume; and because of the hair these sages were cased in a dark shiny leather sparsely tooled in gold. The effect was charming – the more so in that Sir David's features invariably suggested rugged benevolence. Every few years a portrait of Sir David robed in scarlet and black and with Locke and Hume behind him would appear in the exhibitions which our greatest painters arrange at Burlington House. Of these portraits one already hung in the Great Hall of the university, a second could be seen in a dominating position as soon as one entered Sir David's villa residence, and a third was stowed away ready for offer to the National Portrait Gallery when the time came.”
― Michael Innes, The Weight of the Evidence

“You know, the old Nesfield is going. It won't survive the coming war. And I for one shan't mourn it. A nasty rabbit-warren of a place. … And we shall have a sort of dog-kennel civilisation instead. Every man, every family-unit in a nice drudgery-proof kennel with plenty of bright paint and a good high fence around. Do you ever look at the book-stalls? All those magazines about homes and gardens and refrigerators and furniture-polish? It's not a dream world, like the cinema. It's a world on the verge of becoming real. And to my way of thinking, not a bad thing. But desperately insulating and unsociable. The rabbit-warren is at least a shoulder-rubbing sort of place, and that breeds communal feeling, ideas, discontents – the things that make the individual life get somewhere.”
― Michael Innes, The Weight of the Evidence