17 OCTOBER 1941, Page 4

Those quotations. Information received (and hereby grate- fully acknowledged) suggests

that the observation that " You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them " was made by Felix von Schwartzenburg, who established order in Vienna after the 1848 revolution and set Francis Joseph on the throne. (There is a pleasant French variant: " un gouvernement assis sur des baionettes est un gouvernement mal assis"); and that "a crank is a little thing that makes revolutions" is by that diligent and versatile writer, Anon. As to the work regard- ing which I quoted the dictum that " perhaps no other book save the Bible has been so much studied," it was not, as different readers have surmised, Marx's Das Kapital, or Plato's Republic, or Hobbes' Leviathan. It was, according to Dr. Charles Singer's admirable Short History of Science, that boon or bane of our youth, Euclid's Elements.

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