University Of Cambridge Alumni

"The emphasis on the social grounding of politics was, moreover, something which Cobban himself shared, as he showed by developing a "social interpretation of the French Revolution" which highlighted the role of disenchanted venal office-holders (rather than a supposedly triumphant capitalistic grouping) as the true Revolutionary bourgeoisie. He and other Anglo-American scholars who followed in his wake invariably saw the eighteenth-century economy as traditionalist and uncapitalistic – a view which fitted in nicely with the "immobile history" preached by third-generation Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie."

"The circumstantial interpretation seems to be forced on us particularly when we look at the history of international relations during the revolutionary period. True, public opinion in all countries saw the struggle as an ideological one between revolution and established order; but those who actually determined international policies were free from this illusion, though they had to allow for and were prepared to make use of it in others. The history of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars can be told almost exclusively in terms of power politics and explained by the traditions of the countries involved and the personalities of their rulers and ministers."

"The frank recognition of the dominance of power politics in international relations has not been without its effect on the writing of domestic French history. One consequence is that the traditional admiration for Napoleon, and the effort to present him as something other than a military conqueror and dictator, has become difficult even for French historians. Emphasis on the ideological element in the policy of revolutionary governments has also diminished and the desire for territorial aggrandizement, and even more for economic change, come to be seen as a dominant influence over their foreign policies."

"Just seventeen years ago the late Alfred Cobban opened the case against the "orthodox interpretation" of the French Revolution. Ten years later, in 1964, he summed up that case in his brilliant essay on The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cobban's argument and works inspired by or complementary to his revisionism have profoundly affected the historiography not only of the Revolution but of the Old Regime as well. We are today still working out the implications of Cobban's position. Briefly, what Cobban did was to demonstrate that the empirical data gathered by historians, including "Marxist" and "Neo-Marxist" historians, had exploded the "Marxist" theory which purported to explain the Revolution."

"At any point the course of the Revolution could be diverted by a chance happening or an individual decision determined by a freak of personal character. No adequate general history of the Revolution can fail to bring before our eyes a host of individuals, marking with their own idiosyncrasies the events in which they participated. The records are so ample that the deeds and personalities of lesser men as well as of the great stand out clearly. At the same time, the historian whose bias lies in the detection of great impersonal forces can write the history of the Revolution in quite different terms. It would be a mistake to suppose that either approach is exclusively right. The right approach is determined only by the nature of the questions the historian is asking and the right answer by the material of which he asks them."

"The "revolutionary bourgeoisie" as a class concept, Cobban found, dissolves under close analysis. What remains is a loose congeries of socially and economically disparate "middle classes." "Feudalism," whatever it had been, did not exist in eighteenth-century France. What was "overthrown" in 1789 was a vestige of feudalism—admittedly a hated and often onerous one—seigniorial rights. And it was the peasantry, not the "revolutionary bourgeoisie," which acted first and unanswerably against what they labeled "feudalism." In so acting, that is, without regard to and even in opposition to the desires of the Third Estate majority in the National Assembly, the peasantry cannot be subsumed "within the cadre of a bourgeois revolution.""

"Pollock was not only a scholar versed in the lore of the ages, but also a constant and eager observer of the modern world, sensitive to its trends of thought and conversant with its larger movements. To the solution of some of its most difficult legal and political problems he devoted his remarkable abilities as a lawyer-statesman. In these and many other ways Pollock proved himself to be one of the leaders of thought in the national and international life of his times. In the breadth of his knowledge, however, which was not confined to any one branch of learning, he stood out from our over-specialized age, and was far more like a man of the Renaissance than a modern. It is this humanistic outlook and culture which give character to all his writings on the subject-matters that chiefly engaged his attention."

"The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions."

"From an early time, again, we have had a central and powerful legislature which, as it represents the estates of the whole realm, has made statutes binding on the whole, and knows no legal bounds to its competence. Thus our laws have been eminently national and positive, and our particular legal habit of mind is perhaps the most insular of our many insular traits. Our long standing apart from the general movement of European thought has had its drawbacks; but I think it the better opinion that both in jurisprudence and in the not wholly dissimilar case of philosophy the gain has outweighed them."

"So venerable, so majestic, is this living temple of justice, this immemorial and yet freshly growing fabric of the Common Law, that the least of us is happy who hereafter may point to so much as one stone thereof and say, The work of my hands is there."

"All his books, essays, notes, and reviews upon matters legal are marked by a clarity and a felicity of expression which is the touchstone of a master of his craft; and there are one or two passages in some of his essays which reach a high level of eloquence and beauty. The literary quality of his work is due to the extent and variety of his learning in many other subjects besides law. He was an accomplished linguist who could write verses in Latin, Greek, French and German; he knew something of Eastern languages; and he was a philosopher, an historian, and something of a mathematician. He bore his great learning lightly, and, having a subtle sense of humour, he used his literary gifts to produce the witty parodies and other humorous verses which are published in Leading Cases done into English, and in the volume entitled Outside the Law."

"Since the classical period of Roman law there has never been a constitution of affairs more apt to foster the free and intelligent criticism of legal authorities, the untrammelled play of legal speculation and analysis, than now exists in the States of the American Union, where law is developed under many technically independent jurisdictions, but in deference and conformity to a common ideal."

"Equally at home in the Inns of Court and in the Universities, he was for sixty years at the heart of the law. A brooding presence near the Bench, he might have supplied the answer to the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Rooted in the virtues that have come, with whatever truth, to be called Victorian, the fruits of his scholarship were harvested by men who were themselves the products of a new legal education."

"When Charles Darwin created the philosophy of natural history (for no less title is due to the idea which transformed the knowledge of organic nature from a multitude of particulars into a continuous whole), he was working in the same spirit and towards the same ends as the great publicists who, heeding his field of labour as little as he heeded theirs, had laid in the patient study of historical fact the bases of a solid and rational philosophy of politics and law. Savigny, whom we do not yet know or honour enough, and our own Burke, whom we know and honour, but cannot honour too much, were Darwinians before Darwin. In some measure the same may be said of the great Frenchman Montesquieu, whose unequal but illuminating genius was lost in a generation of formalists."

"A short time after my father's death I was surprised, indeed a little staggered, to hear an accomplished Oxford professor call him "the most learned man since Bacon.""

"Oh, tis a way that spoiles things haply good When itching youngsters crop themselves i'th bud, And so prove rotten before ripe, to win't, That they may have their names but seene in print."

"The revolution was to an important extent one against and not for the rising forces of capitalism. In addition it can be interpreted...in terms of a general tension and social antagonism between the poor and the rich."

"Our Constitution is popular in that the life of the English people, from the greatest to the least, has gone to make it what it is; and it has at almost all times combined the tenacity of tradition with a great power of assimilating fresh elements, and of adapting existing organs to new purposes. For some considerable time our national institutions and our national character have been confirming one another in this habit."

"He had read almost every important book on these subjects and, although he had not Acton's miraculous visual memory for books, he never forgot what he read and always had the facts ready in his mind. His Introduction to Political Science has remained what it was on publication, the best book on the subject. Though not a professed Shakespearean scholar, he had the bulk of Shakespeare's plays so incrusted in his memory that he hardly ever had need to refer to the text and was the originator of more than one illuminating emendation. His knowledge of mediæval and of classical history was complete: it was superior to Acton's in that to him they were always living subjects... On balance, and saving alone modern history in its fullest sweep, I am driven to the conclusion that my father's learning was barely, if it all, less than that of so renowned a man as Acton and in some respects greater."

"Our lady the Common Law will note other people's fashions and take a hint from them in season, but she will have no thanks for judges or legislators who steal incongruous tags and patches and offer to bedizen her raiment with them. Assimilation of foreign elements, we have already seen, may be a very good thing. Crude and hasty borrowing of foreign details is unbecoming at best, and almost always mischievous. When you are tempted to make play with foreign ideas or terms, either for imitation or for criticism, the first thing is to be sure that you understand them."

"Pollock was perhaps the last representative of the "old broad culture." To take only his literary recreations, he easily and habitually wrote verse in Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian, he was a brilliant parodist of the English poets from Chaucer down to his friend Swinburne (as in his well-known Leading Cases), and he had quite a fair acquaintance with Persian and Sanskrit. He was an active and prominent member of the Rabelais Club. In addition he was well read in philosophy, and was a respectable mathematician. He was more of a celebrity in Europe and in the United States than here."

"The nationalist of the type of Justice Wilson clings steadfastly to the essential principle of home rule for local purposes. The principle is one of the foundation stones of the two great nations of the North American Continent—that of local self-government. No nationalist will deny this. What he denies is that local power is sovereign over national concerns. The point is clearly brought out by the British writer, Oliver, in his work on Hamilton, perhaps the most intelligent piece of writing on American politics published in this generation."

"[T]hat remarkable man, Fred Oliver...was also engaged in writing his study of Sir Robert Walpole (entitled The Endless Adventure) which I much admired. His conversation and personality were unique; he seemed a cross between a Cheviot shepherd and Matthew Arnold."

"[T]he Oliver of these pages [i]s essentially an incipient fascist... His ideal clearly is the nation-in-arms, internecine differences abolished, the country disciplined and organised for action. Himself an eminent businessman, accustomed to the autocratic exercise of power, he conceives of national organisation in similar terms. His only object is to win."

"[W]e have ever in our minds what our easy-going fellow-countrymen are so apt to forget—that an unceasing and desperate struggle for existence—nation against nation—is forever going on; and that it is waged for the most part by very able men, underground, in the chanceries of the world. It has never been otherwise and, so far as we can see, it never will be otherwise; for the nations of the world are like the wild creatures of the jungle and the veld, each one eternally on its guard against the others."

"The biography of Hamilton by the late F. S. Oliver and that of Lincoln by Lord Charnwood ought to be known to every educated man."

"And thou New-England, which art exalted in privileges of the Gospel above many other people, know thou the time of thy visitation, and consider the great things the Lord hath done for thee. The Gospel hath free passage in all places where thou dwellest; oh that it might be glorified also by thee! ... The Lord looks for more from thee, than from other people; more zeal for God, more love to his truth, more justice and equity in thy ways. Thou shouldst be a special people, an only people, none like thee in all the earth."

"It was impossible, in Hamilton's view, for a nation to act towards other nations as a man of warm feelings would act towards his neighbours. A nation cannot afford to indulge itself in hatred or affection, magnanimity or revenge. In deciding upon its course of action, sentiment is as irrelevant a consideration as malice, and wars of chivalry are as iniquitous as wars of religion. The statesman who bends to an emotional outburst of public opinion as richly deserves to be shot as a general who surrenders a city out of compassion for the inhabitants. The stern test of the righteousness of a war is the permanent security of the state. A government which goes knight-erranting out of sympathy for foreign nations is like a trustee who subscribes to charities out of the property he has undertaken to administer. A government, like a trustee, is responsible for the estate. Its business is sound investments, not the encouragement of deserving institutions or the succour of honest, poor men overwhelmed by adversity. Pity and prejudice are equally out of place when ministers, in whom king or people has placed the serious confidence of decision, come to determine the tremendous issues of alliances and wars."

"The spirit of the nation is a great force, but it is one which cannot be always on the alert, and while it sleeps, the part of noble institutions is to keep watch."

"The only two men who really seem to understand that we are at war are Winston and Lloyd George. Both have faults which disgust one peculiarly at the present time, but there is a reality about them and they are in earnest, which the others aren't."

"Danger is the inseparable companion of honour. The greatest deeds in history were not done by people who thought of safety first. It is possible to be too much concerned even with one's own salvation. There will not be much hope left for humanity when men are no longer willing to risk their immortal as well as their mortal parts. With all the temptations, dangers and degradations that beset it, politics is still, I think, the noblest career that any man can choose."

"If a country will not stand up for its rights it must certainly lose them. The spirit of giving in is the most fatal disease to which nations are subject, and it is apt to attack them, like cancer, when they have arrived at the meridian. Jingoism itself is less fatal than the appeal on all occasions to material scales, in order to decide whether the injury that threatens the country is likely to be less or greater than the sacrifices that may be needed to prevent it. Concessions to unjust or impudent demands have a formidable knack of breeding. The nation that submits from laziness or fear, or because it is too short-sighted to detect the specious fallacies of arithmetic, will certainly lose its own confidence and the respect of its neighbours; and these two things are the very foundations of national prosperity."

"Freedom of Speech, or the Liberty of the Press, (which is only a Conveyance of that Speech to Multitudes whom the Voice cannot reach) often does Mischief. This is certain. But let It be once taken away, under what Pretence soever; and how much greater Mischiefs must follow? All the Mischiefs, of Darkness in the Intellectual World, of Baseness in the Moral World, and of Slavery in the Political World."

"To the same Revolution We owe That Limited Form of Government which is our only Security; Those Parliaments, in which Our own Consent frames Our own Laws; Those Laws so framed, and afterwards executed, in an Administration of Justice, with regard to the Affairs of Life and of Property, utterly unexperienced by any Nation of the Known World, except Ourselves."

"In our own Country, All Civil Freedom itself subsists in the highest Degree, by that very Freedom of Speech, which often, through Mistake or Malice, attacks Those who protect it. Liberty of finding Fault, is in a peculiar Sense the Birthright of British Freeborn Subjects. Nor shall it ever be any Argument with Me, to oppress or stifle this Liberty, that it is abused. Nay, If it sometimes becomes Exorbitant Licentiousness; I will no more admit This Exorbitance to be a Reason for taking it away, when it happens not to please or serve the Persons, or the Cause, to which I wish well; than I will plead for cutting out Men's Tongues, because They talk too freely of what They understand nothing of. If any thing be found fault with, let it be defended, if it can. If it cannot be defended, let it go on to be found fault with. The Cure of what is Evil in all this, (except in Cases of the highest Immediate Malignity to the State), is only to lie in every Man's own Breast."

"The significance attached to the fact that the Indogermans were acquainted with the horse . . . may have been exaggerated. We do not know the precise meaning of the Indogermanic words in question; we do not know whether they mean the domesticated or the wild animals." ... "it is difficult to see how these names can be safely used for determining the original home of the Indogermans"."

"In summary the Indo-Europeanist’s data and method do not allow the question ‘When was PIE spoken?’ to be answered in any really meaningful or helpful way."

"From the linguistic data alone... it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of PIE, or even the age of the language family."

"What does this mean for the origin of the Indic languages, and by extension, the origin of the Indic civilization? My answer is, I am afraid, inconclusive. From the linguistic data alone, without taking into account the evidence of archaeology or early texts, it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, or even the age of the language family. The Indo-European model, as a model of language relationships and of linguistic descent, tells us nothing certain about the origin of the Indic civilization."

"Thus, in the case of Indo-European language relationships, it is possible to make the argument that the creation of a hypothesis relating the languages of Northern India to those of Europe was initially created and promulgated by nineteenth century scholars in order to promote agendas of colonialism or racism."

"The majority of fishes produce s in enormous numbers, amounting in some cases to several millions, and correlated with this the size of the individual egg has become much reduced. The average diameter of a ean egg may be taken as about 1 . In an egg of this size segmentation of so markedly meroblastic a character would be puzzling except on the hypothesis that the meroblastic condition had arisen in ancestral forms in which the eggs were much larger."

"The general lecture course in is accompanied by laboratory work extending over a hundred hours. In great part this follows the usual lines such as are laid down in and Hurst’s Text-book, but a special feature is made of the study of a valuable series of demonstration specimens. This includes the study, under high-power s, of such organisms as s, , s, and s. Experience has shown that students fully appreciate the privilege of being able to examine such preparations for themselves, and that they take the greatest care not to do damage. Opportunities are also given for seeing Trypanosomes, , e and so on, in the living condition. This demonstration part of the course is regarded as being of special value in arousing and gripping the interest of the student."

"Imperfect as is the , how infinitely more imperfect must necessarily be our knowledge of that record! The largest s, , and other excavations made by man, are in themselves relatively insignificant scratches on the surface of the vast mass of fossil-bearing rocks, but yet how small a fraction of the material obtained in such excavations ever passes under the detailed scrutiny of the palaeontologist."

"He once jokingly referred to the report, published in , of his award of the in 1955 as "a very pleasant obituary notice"."

"Tell England, you that pass our monument, Men who died serving Her rest here, content."

"Lockhart had already been in collision a number of times with the Russian interpreter, a small fiery individual who seemed to regard every request for stores or facilities as yet another example of the top-hatted capitalists milking the simple proletariat. On their last morning, an hour before sailing, there developed between them a row so furious and so all-embracing that it was difficult to remember that it had started with a complaint about the quality of the fresh meat supplied to Saltash for her return journey. When it had ranged widely, from a comparison of the Russian and the British standards of living, to an analysis of their respective war efforts, and fists had been shaken on both sides-for Lockhart found this habit of emphasis infectious—the interpreter took a stormy departure. At the head of the gang-way he turned, for a final blistering farewell."You English," he said, in thunderous accents and with extraordinary venom, "think we know damn nothing—but I tell you we know damn all.""

"Just before Christmas, two Allied countries had sustained naval losses of shocking dimensions: Britain had lost two great ships—Prince of Wales and Repulse—in a single bombing attack, and America, at Pearl Harbor, had suffered a crippling blow that robbed her of half her effective fleet at one stroke. ("Proper uproar, it must have been," Lockhart overheard someone in the mess-decks say; and another anonymous voice answered: "Biggest surprise since Ma caught 'er tits in the mangle....") The attack brought America into the war, an ally coming to the rescue at a most crucial moment: but her principal war was never the Atlantic—that lifeline remained, from beginning to end, the ward of the British and the Canadian navies. America turned her eyes to the Pacific, where she had much to do to stem the furious tide of the Japanese advance: in the Atlantic, the battle of escort against U-boat still saw the same contestants in the ring, now coming up for the fourth round, the bloodiest so far."

"It was a marvellous morning, clear as a mirror, warm as the promise of love, bright as heaven."

"Ericson was a big man, broad and tough: a man to depend on, a man to remember: about forty-two or -three, fair hair going grey, blue eyes as level as a foot rule, with wrinkles at the corners — the product of humour and of twenty years' staring at a thousand horizons."

"The landlords' land was seized in in the summer of 1917—that is, during the , and before the Communists came into power. I was told afterwards that by October of that year there was a single great estate left in the But it appears that the formal allocation of the land did not take place until after the . With the land, the stock and implements (inventar) were distributed also."