Dead heroes and living memories
Dumas's tomb is the same as that of Jean Moulin. And Zola. And André Malraux
By Robert Fisk - 04 March 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article349076.ece
Let us now praise famous men. I'm talking about the dead variety, of course, because I suspect we are defined as a people by the way we honour our dead as much as the way we treat the living. My dad, old Bill Fisk, used to force me to walk round the aisles of All Saints Church in Maidstone to look at the inscriptions, pointing to the moth-eaten battle honours of the Royal West Kent Regiment over our heads.
I rather liked the way we Brits did things in so haphazard a way. Churchill lies under a simple stone in Blaydon in Oxfordshire. Our poets cluster together in Westminster Abbey. Under the nave are the remains of Isaac Newton. "Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race," it says in Latin above his grave. Three miles away, the Iron Duke commands heaven alone in his black iron catafalque in Saint Paul's. My favourite epitaph remains that of Dean Swift - he wrote it himself, again in Latin - in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, the translation of which I owe to reader Stephen Williams:
Sorry - full article not yet available. Please try again soon.