Horizon TV - Hubble: The Ultimate Telescope TV - Laura Cumming TV - Sid Vicious - Samuel Butler - Philip Stubbs - William Shakespeare - Noam Chomsky - Alfred Lord Tennyson - J G Ballard - James Joyce - Tennessee Williams - Thomas Hardy - Christina Rossetti - Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook TV -
Marshall’s design called for the finest mirrors ever made. Horizon: The Sharpest Show of the Universe, BBC 1990
NASA’s promise – a window on the universe; it turns out our view is blurred. Horizon: Small Problem with the Mirror, BBC 1991
It was soon after the telescope was launched that NASA admitted to a blunder. Ten years before by a simple mistake with a measuring instrument, the mirror had been ground to the wrong prescription. Horizon: Hubble’s Vision, BBC 1994
It takes engineers four million man-hours to design and build the mirrors. Hubble: The Ultimate Telescope, National Geographic 2010
Short-sighted: the vast primary concave mirror is too flat. ibid.
NASA must fix Hubble ... They need to fit a series of lenses or mirrors that will cancel out the flaw in the main mirror. ibid.
The mirror: the artist’s secret accomplice. Laura Cumming, Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits, BBC 2013
I’ve only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror. Sid Vicious
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only. Samuel Butler
These looking-glasses be called the Devil’s bellows, wherewith he bloweth the blast of pride into our hearts, and those who look in them may be said to look in the Devil’s arse. Philip Stubbs, puritan
You go not, till I set you up a glass,
Where you may see the inmost part of you. William Shakespeare, Hamlet III iv 19
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster.’ Instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. Noam Chomsky
The mirror crack’d from side to side
‘The curse has come upon me.’ cried
The Lady of Shalott. Alfred Lord Tennyson
I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror. J G Ballard, on writing Crash, cited Miers & Sharko
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant. James Joyce
There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors. Tennessee Williams
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’ ... Thomas Hardy, I Look Into My Glass
All things that pass
Are woman’s looking-glass;
They show her how her bloom must fade,
And she herself be laid
With withered roses in the shade;
With withered roses and the fallen peach,
Unlovely, out of reach
Of summer’s joy that was. Christina Rossetti, Passing and Glassing
Professor V S Ramachandran: his [patient’s] brain had tried to rewire itself … This conflict between sight and touch … An idea that if patients could see a limb where their brain was telling them they could feel one, this might reduce the confusion and the pain … Professor Ramachandran called it mirror therapy. Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook I, BBC 2017