Later Life
Birrell did not defend his seat in the 1918 general election, nor did he ever return to Ireland. In 1929, he accepted an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, but storms in the Irish Sea prevented him from making the crossing and he had to receive his degree in absentia. He returned to literature with a further volume of essays and book reviews, More Obiter Dicta (1920) and a book on his father-in-law, Frederick Locker-Lampson. He died in London on 20 November 1933, aged eighty-three. His autobiography, Things Past Redress was published posthumously.
Read more about this topic: Augustine Birrell
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....”
—Wallace Stevens (18791955)