Fellows of the British Academy

"On the side of physics, there were a few key figures in Oxford who realized, in all probability unlike the majority of their colleagues in the physics department, that physics without interpretation is only part of the story, and that theories like quantum mechanics need careful foundational reflection."

"It is far easier to learn science first and philosophy later than the other way round!"

"An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful....any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language."

"Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul."

"All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell."

"Feign then what's by a decent tact believed And act that state is only so conceived, And build an edifice of form For house where phantoms may keep warm."

"There is a supreme God in the ethnological section; ... His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world."

"Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations And dissolve into our judgement all their codes. Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation (People are continually asking one the way out), Let us stand here and admit that we have no road."

"Being everything, let us admit that is to be something, Or give ourselves the benefit of the doubt; Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God, And grant his reign over the entire building."

"Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet Revere; do not presume to think her wasted. Project her no projectile, plan nor man it; Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted."

"It is the pain, it is the pain, endures. Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours."

"Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves."

"Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men."

"Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell's Pointed exclusive conclave, at earth’s centre (Your spun farm's root still on that axis dwells); And up, through galaxies, a growing sector."

"Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis."

"Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. My house was on a cliff. The thing could take Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. Then the long pause and then the bigger shake. It seemed the best thing to be up and go."

"But as to risings, I can tell you why. It is on contradiction that they grow. It seemed the best thing to be up and go. Up was the heartening and the strong reply The heart of standing is we cannot fly."

"Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills."

"Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills."

"Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?"

"Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical."

"Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture."

"It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange. The more things happen to you the more you can't Tell or remember even what they were.The contradictions cover such a range. The talk would talk and go so far aslant. You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there."

"The waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity."

"To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public."

"The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own."

"The man writes with such genuine passion for the books he's discussing. With so many critics you feel they're writing so people will say they're good critics."

"The plain fact is that many of the reputations which today occupy the poetic limelight are such as would crumble immediately if poetry such as Empson's, with its passion, logic, and formal beauty, were to become widely known."

"Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson are the greatest English critics of their respective centuries not least because they are the funniest."

"Though a skilled mathematician, Alfred Marshall used mathematics sparingly. He saw that excessive reliance on this instrument might lead us astray in pursuit of intellectual toys, imaginary problems not conforming to the conditions of real life: and further, might distort our sense of proportion by causing us to neglect factors that could not easily be worked up in the mathematical machine."

"Prosperity ends in a crisis. The era of optimism dies in the crisis, but in dying it gives birth to an era of pessimism. This new era is born, not an infant, but a giant; for an industrial boom has necessarily been a period of strong emotional excitement, and an excited man passes from one form of excitement to another more rapidly than he passes to quiescence. Under the new error, business is unduly depressed."

"When a man sets out upon any course of inquiry, the object of his search may be either light or fruit — either knowledge for its own sake or knowledge for the sake of good things to which it leads. In various fields of study these two ideals play parts of varying importance. In the appeal made to our interest by nearly all the great modern sciences some stress is laid both upon the light-bearing and upon the fruit-bearing quality, but the proportions of the blend are different in different sciences. At one end of the scale stands the most general science of all, metaphysics, the science of reality. Of the student of that science it is, indeed, true that "he yet may bring some worthy thing for waiting souls to see"; but it must be light alone, it can hardly be fruit that he brings. Most nearly akin to the metaphysician is the student of the ultimate problems of physics. The corpuscular theory of matter is, hitherto, a bearer of light alone. Here, however, the other aspect is present in promise; for speculations about the structure of the atom may lead one day to the discovery of practical means for dissociating matter and for rendering available to human use the overwhelming resources of intra-atomic energy."

"If it were not for the hope that a scientific study of men's social actions may lead, not necessarily directly or immediately, but at some time and in some way, to practical results in social improvement, not a few students of these actions would regard the time devoted to their study as time misspent. That is true of all social sciences, but especially true of economics. For economics "is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life"; and it is not in the ordinary business of life that mankind is most interesting or inspiring."

"One who desired knowledge of man apart from the fruits of knowledge would seek it in the history of religious enthusiasm, of martyrdom, or of love; he would not seek it in the market-place. When we elect to watch the play of human motives that are ordinary — that are sometimes mean and dismal and ignoble — our impulse is not the philosopher's impulse, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the physiologist's, knowledge for the healing that knowledge may help to bring."

"Wonder, Carlyle declared, is the beginning of philosophy. It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science. Here, if in no other field, Comte's great phrase holds good: "It is for the heart to suggest our problems; it is for the intellect to solve them.... The only position for which the intellect is primarily adapted is to be the servant of the social sympathies.""

"It is not pretended that, at the present stage of its development, economic science is able to provide an organon even remotely approaching to what it imagines for itself as its ideal."

"Even if the constants which economists wish to determine were less numerous, and the method of experiment more accessible, we should still be faced with the fact that the constants themselves are different at different times. The gravitation constant is the same always. But the economic constants — these elasticities of demand and supply — depending, as they do, upon human consciousness, are liable to vary. The constitution of the atom, as it were, and not merely its position, changes under the influence of environment."

"It is the glory of English Law, that its roots are sunk deep into the soil of national history; that it is the slow product of the age long growth of the national life."

"Only when a disputed point has long caused bloodshed and disturbance, or when a successful invader (military or theological) insists on a change, is it necessary to draw up a code."

"The thegn who deems an unjust doom is to lose his thegnship. It is a principle which can be widely applied"

"The man who has been wounded by a chance arrow must not shoot at sight the first man he happens to meet."

"But the fact that the word "chattel" has survived as the inclusive legal term for all movable goods, points, not merely to the great importance of cattle in primitive times, but to the importance of the notion of sale or barter in generating the institution of property."

"Whatever else the Norman Conquest may or may not have done, it made the old haphazard state of legal affairs forever impossible."

"Every man, noble and simple alike, should hold his land as a pledge of god behaviour. His duties, to King, lord, and neighbour, should be settled once and for all; and, if he failed in them, he should be turned out of his home and left to starve. It was a drastic scheme; but a conqueror holding a conquered country by the force of the sword cannot afford to be squeamish."

"In the Laws of Cnut, it was formally laid down that no one is to bother the King with his complaints, so long as he can get Justice in the Hundred."

"Legal business has, from the beginning of time, been profitable - to those who have conducted it; because it is concerned with things that touch men's passions very deeply, and because men are willing to pay, and pay highly, for wisdom and skill in the conduct of it. The real merits of the Norman lawyers were, not altruism, but ability, energy, and enthusiasm for their work."

"The invention of writs was really the making of the English Common Law; and the credit of this momentous achievement, which took place chiefly between 1150 and 1250, must be shared between the officials of the royal Chancery, who framed new forms, and the royal judges, who either allowed them or quashed them."

"The 'inquests' which resulted in the compilation of the Domesday Book made a vivid and unfavorable impression on the country. A similar effect was produced by the inquests of 1166 and 1170, before alluded to. Even to this day, the word 'inquisitorial' bears the burden of historical unpopularity."

"This again, led judges and lawyers to insist on the importance of possession, or seisin, as evidence and presumptions of title, and thus to give to the seisin of land that unique importance in English land law which it has ever been held."

"The common law of chattels, that is to say, the law ultimately adopted by the King's courts for the regulation of disputes about the ownership and possession of goods, was, to be a substantial extent, a by-product of that new procedure which had been mainly introduced to perfect the feudal scheme of land law."

"What is technically called the 'fungibility' of money, is its chief value as an article of commerce; and this fact could not long remain recognized, even by such a conservative class as legal officials."

"It is true, that a Law of Contract based on causae will always be an arbitrary and inelastic law; but it is a kind of law with which some great nations are satisfied at the present day."

"It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point."

"But we remember that it was just precisely in the reign of Richard II that the Peasants' War, following upon the changes wrought by the visitations of the Great Plague, virtually destroyed serfdom as a personal status."

"The popularity of the famous device of the use of lands into England is said to be largely due to the mendicant friars of the then new Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis, who, arriving in this country, in the first half of the thirteenth century, found themselves hampered by their own vows of poverty, no less than by the growing feeling against Mortmain in acquiring the provision of land absolutely necessary for their rapidly developing work."

"The fate of the Statute of Uses is one of the most curious in legal history. Its secret and unavowed purpose, of securing the estates of the monasteries for the Crown, it accomplished. Its ostensible purpose, fortified by a wealth of hypocritical justification, it entirely failed to achieve. Not only were devises of lands, after a brief interval, put on a legal footing; but, as is well known, uses of lands as distinguished from legal estates, soon re-appeared in full vigour. Whilst in unforeseen directions, that statute worked havoc in the medieval system of conveyancing; and gradually modernized it out of existence."

"A statute of 1344 shows some weakness; but the statute of 1391 is memorable, not merely as being the Mortmain Code of three centuries, but as extending the rule of mortmain to all bodies, religious and secular alike, having perpetual succession. For this extension marks the definite recognition by English Law of the corporation, or, as it is sometimes called, the 'fictitious person' - the legal personality which is not restricted to the limits of individual life. The gradual evolution of this institution is one of the most fascinating chapters in legal history..."

"The feudal warranty is, doubtless derived from the ancient duty of the feudal lord to protect his liege man 'with fire and sword against all deadly'. It was of the essence of the feudal bond, that the vassal should be under his lord's protection."

"But then a daring evasion by a leading conveyancer, known as the Lease and Release, received judicial sanction; and commenced a successful career of more than 200 years. The Lease and Release, attributed to Serjeant Moore, was based on the fact that the Statute of Inrolments did not apply to terms of years."

"Thus the period we are studying is remarkable for achieving, not merely the right of free alienation of land, but also the right of alienation by secret conveyance. The latter achievement we may sometimes regret; but it was, probably, necessary for the complete emancipation of land from its its ancient tribal and feudal bonds."

"First in point of time and interest comes the mortgage debt, i.e. the claim for the return of money lent on the security of some tangible object. Such claims are among the earliest fruits of a commercial civilization, and are nearly always affected the same way, viz. by the deposit or pledge of the security with the creditor, to be redeemed or returned on the payment of the debt."

"We regard an action of Contract as an action to prevent or compensate for a breach of a promise; an action of Tort as an action to to punish or compensate for a wrong, such as assault or defamation, which has not any necessary connection with a promise."

"The progress of the nation in wealth and refinement, however, naturally brought with it an increase in the number of crimes, as the old definition of offences became inadequate."

"The 'Little' or 'Barebones' Parliament, summoned by Oliver Cromwell to meet at Westminster on 4th July, 1653, after the dissolution of the remains of the Long Parliament, may have been an unpractical body, so far as the task of administration in troublous times was concerned. But it seems quite possible that the wealth of contumely and scorn which has been poured upon it was, originally, due quite as much to the fierce anger of vested interests against outspoken criticism, as to any real vagueness or want of practical wisdom in the plans of the House itself."

"The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule."

"It was natural that the direct wielders of the royal prerogative, men who sat in the Star Chamber and the Privy Council, who knew the secrets of the State and the necessity for prompt action, should despise the merely declaratory character of a good deal of Common Law process. To them we doubtless owe those four great pillars of Chancery jurisdiction, the injunction, the decree, the sequestration, and the commission of rebellion."

"Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?"

"The practice of creating chartered joint-stock companies of a modern type seems to have begun at the commencement of the seventeenth century; and the formation of the East India Company is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, examples. At first, it appears, the 'joint stock' of the company was separately made up for each ship; perhaps for each voyage. But, in the year 1612 the Company made the momentous resolve to have one joint stock for the whole of its affairs, and thus inaugurated a new epoch. The East India Company, or Companies, (for there were two of them), were followed by the Hudson's Bay Company (1670), the existence of which was recognized by statute in 1707, and by the Bank of England and the notorious South Sea Company."

"In the year 1871, Mr. Gladstone's Government introduced and passed the first Trade Union Act, by far the most important victory, up to that time achieved by the champions of labour organizations."

"It may be that the requirement of a preliminary approval by the Grand Jury, of all accusations of a serious nature, justified the boast that a man was presumed to be innocent until he was 'found' guilty; but that presumption certainly ceased to have practical application, so soon as the Grand Jury had returned a 'true bill'."

"Perhaps the best testimony to the effectiveness of the reforms of 1852 is the fact, that men of a slightly later generation, familiar with the working of the courts half a century after, find it difficult to believe that such abuses as are plainly described by the legislation of that year, should really have existed in the middle of the nineteenth century."

"Thus, at long last, as a visible emblem of unity was daily growing in the new Palace of Justice then being erected in the Strand, half way between the historic site of Westminster the historic centre of the commercial capital of the world, there began to grow up, in the minds of reformers, the vision of a great and united Supreme Court of Justice, with uniform principles, uniform law, and uniform procedure."

"With historical as well as legal talent Jenks was a notable researcher into the English Civil War, although his most provocative essay, in the Independent Review 1904-05, challenged the interpretation of Magna Carta. He was elected a fellow of the in 1930 and received many other academic honours."

"Perhaps the most interesting and useful short account of early institutions is to be found in Mr. Edward Jenks's The State and the Nation. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with primitive institutions, patriarchal institutions, and political society. The whole treatment is admirably lucid and balanced."

"Error is not a mere accident of an untrained intellect, but a necessary stage or feature or moment of the expression of the truth."

"We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody."

"“the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and the real world includes its own interpreter”"

"Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience…."

"I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana."

"He (William James) loved Him as a friend of his youth, a neighbour of thirty years and a high minded companion of arms in the moral struggle."

"The word (classical) carries the implication that the works of art and literature produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others are to be judged."

"Greek culture was competitive. Each successive historian and philosopher made a point of showing how he improved on his predecessor."

"A society in whose culture the Ancient Greeks played such an important part was bound to have a view about the Modern Greeks. The inhabitants of that famous land, whose language was still recognizably the same as that of Demosthenes, could not be regarded as just another remote tribe of natives or savages. Western Europe could not escape being concerned with the nature of the relationship between the Ancient and the Modem Greeks. The question has teased, perplexed, and confused generations of Greeks and Europeans and it still stirs passions to an extent difficult for the rational to condone."

"Whether the present inhabitants of Greece are descended from the Ancient Greeks is a profoundly unsatisfactory question. No method of subdividing the question makes much sense. On the one hand, one can attempt to trace the numerous incursions of immigrants to Greece and try to assess the extent to which the ‘blood’ of the Ancients has been diluted by outside races, Romans, barbarians, Franks, Turks, Venetians, Albanians, etc. On the other hand, one can point to the remarkable survival of ideas and customs and, in particular, to the astonishing strength of the linguistic tradition."

"But neither approach seems to lead to the kind of answer which those who ask the question are seeking. What they seem to want to know is—Are the Modern Greeks the same as the Ancient Greeks? Are their racial and national characteristics the same? Do the Modern Greeks behave in the same kind of way as the Ancient Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians behaved? If one looks among the Modem Greeks will one find the equivalents of Pericles and Sophocles and Plato? By their nature such questions are vague and contain within them a host of assumptions—about human nature, genetics and race, the influence of environment on behaviour, and the reliability of our knowledge of ancient history—all of which are questionable and some of which are simply unfounded."

"During the hundreds of years since the glorious age of Greece, various views have been held about the Modern Greeks. Europeans of the Middle Ages and Renaissance times may have assumed that the Modern Greeks were the descendants of the Ancients hut they were far from regarding this as implying any continuity of character, let alone imposing any obligation. To be Greek was to be a drunkard, a lecher, and, especially, a cheat, It never seems to have occurred to the men who issued the calls to join in the defence of Byzantium, for example, to suggest that they were aiding the descendants of Pericles. Nor as Christians did the Western Europeans (of whatever sect) feel any instinctive sympathy for the schismatic Christians of the Orthodox Church."

"I say cowardice, because the stan­dards which is Isaiah Berlin himself has set for anyone who undertakes such an enterprise are dauntingly high. His ability to catch the allegiances and the emotional tone of the authors he has written about, as well as his ability to meet the commentator's first duty to the subtleties of their thought, has always meant that their per­ sonalities and ideas alike have remained in tact and alive."

"Mankind has always argued about justice and injustice, while social scientists and politicians have endlessly discussed the conditions which make justice more or less attainable. These essays discuss a more philosophical issue-what justice is and why it matters. Although their authors were philosophers, few of them were 'professional ' philosophers..."

"This is appropriate. Justice is the most 'political' or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice. … Doing justice is not the primary purpose of the family, the classroom, the small business, even though a father, teacher, or employer ought to behave justly towards children, pupils, or employees when rearing them, teaching them, . and employing them."

"Justice is peculiarly stringent. Its demands may not be modified. Judges and rulers must 'do justice though the heavens fall', not allow family connections, friendship, or even personal worth to turn them aside."

"Justice is closely connected to respect for rights. Modern writers discuss both subjects together with no suggestion that one might discuss one with the other. It was not always so. Greek political theory and Roman Law had sophisticated ideas about justice in its various aspects, but did not embrace our conception of individual rights. This may seem counter-intuitive. How could a society recognize someone as the owner of a piece of property without acknowledging an individual right? How does legitimate one-man­ rule, monarchy, differ from its illegitimate parody, tyranny, unless the lawful king has a right to the authority he exercises that the tyrant does not? The answer is that property and authority were defined by law rather than our notion of individual rights. To own property was to be the person to whom the law accorded the privileges and immunities that locally defined ownership. To be a legitimate ruler was to be the person the law designated to rule. It is a commonplace that ancient notions of law accorded far more power over property to the family and other groups than modern notions of private property do. Even under the Roman Law, where ownership had an 'absolute' and sovereign character, property was not understood in the modern way; when the law told the judge to give a man his ius, this primarily meant that he should be treated as the law required. The 'subjective' understanding of rights, whereby the right-holder may stand on his rights or not as he chooses, was not a Roman notion."

"Justice is a virtue, but not one that makes people lovable."

"John Rawls says that justice is the 'first virtue' of social institutions, meaning that it is more fundamental than any other, and that we cannot expect individuals to accept social regulation, and engage in social co-operation unless the terms on which society operates are seen as reasonably just. To talk as though Plato and Aristotle saw justice as a matter of the terms of social and political co-operation may suggest a modern and individualist perspective foreign to both. Yet it is not wholly misleading."

"Justice stands in an awkward relationship with utility. The general practice of justice conduces to human welfare, probably more than anything else. The old tag sums up justice as 'honeste vivere, neminem laedere, suum cuique tribuere' … Yet, justice seems also to conflict with utility and even with the general welfare, let alone the welfare of particular people."

"The one thing we can say is that if Socrates really expected to get a definitive answer to his question, 'What is justice?' when talking to his friends on their way back to the Piraeus, he has been disappointed. It remains a contentious and disputed subject."

"Much of the time, the question goes unasked in prosperous liberal democracies like Britain or the United States, because most of us see political equality as exhausted by “one person, one vote” and dig no deeper; we know that one person, one vote coexists with the better-off and better-organized buying influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and use of the mass media, but we find ourselves puzzled to balance a belief that everyone has the right to use his or her resources to influence government—which is certainly one form of political equality—with our sense that excessive inequality of political resources undermines democracy."

"I am uncomfortable with the thought that serious thinkers about politics may retire into the ivory tower and write difficult—if often very interesting—essays and books for their colleagues alone, leaving debates over the prospects of modern political life to the punditry of contributors to the op-ed pages, or the shouting matches that pass for political debate on some television channels."

"Political thought as we understand it began in Athens because the Athenians were a trading people who looked at their contemporaries and saw how differently they organized themselves. If they had not lived where they did and organized their economic lives as they did, they could not have seen the contrast. Given the opportunity, they might not have paid attention to it. The Israelites of the Old Testament narrative were very conscious of their neighbors, Egyptian, Babylonian, and other, not least because they were often reduced to slavery or near-slavery by them. That narrative makes nothing of the fact that Egypt was a bureaucratic theocracy; it emphasizes that the Egyptians did not worship Yahweh. The history of Old Testament politics is the history of a people who did their best to have no politics. They saw themselves as under the direct government of God, with little room to decide their own fate except by obeying or disobeying God’s commandments. Only when God took them at their word and allowed them to choose a king did they become a political society, with familiar problems of competition for office and issues of succession. For the Jews, politics was a fall from grace. For the Greeks, it was an achievement. Many besides Plato thought it a flawed achievement; when historians and philosophers began to articulate its flaws, the history of political thought began among the argumentative Athenians."

"Plato was accused by some of his twentieth-century critics of racism, totalitarianism, fascism, and other political crimes with a very contemporary flavor. These accusations are too anachronistic to be taken seriously; whatever explains Hitler and Mussolini, it is not the dialogues of Plato. The more plausible complaint is that Plato does not take seriously the inescapability of politics in some form. Plato’s metaphysics is fascinating; so is his conviction that the just man does better than the unjust man, no matter what earthly fate befalls him. His political thinking often amounts to an injunction to abolish the conflicts that politics exists to resolve and fantasies about how it might be done."

"Aristotle’s perspective is not ours. Modern political discussion is imbued with a concern for individual human rights; we look to institutions to hold accountable those who wield power over their fellows, so that the rights of individuals are respected. Aristotle does not. Because he sees the world in teleological terms, he asks—as Plato did—how we can ensure that the state functions as it should. The excellence of the citizenry and the excellence of the constitution are understood in that light. Hence, of course, Aristotle’s focus on the collective intelligence and collective good sense of collectives; if “the many” are not to be trusted, it remains true that many heads are better than one."

"Aristotle’s enthusiasm for the preservation of social distinction and his emphasis on the social position of the “high-souled” man remind us that even in his favored politeia, with as many respectable and steady men of the middle class admitted to political participation as is possible, Aristotle hankered after the rule of true, that is, natural aristocrats. If that attitude is not unknown two and a half millennia later, his unconcern with those left out of this vision of the world—women, ordinary working people, foreigners, slaves—is happily rather less common. But we shall not see much sympathy for ordinary lives and ordinary happiness for many centuries yet, certainly not in the work of Cicero."

"As his life and death suggest, Cicero was addicted to Roman politics; he wrote beautifully about the pleasures of a quiet life in the countryside, but hankered for the hurly-burly of the Senate and the courts. His political theory is reflective but far from dispassionate."

"Together with the histories of Polybius and Livy, Cicero’s polemical speeches and writings, and his personal correspondence, form some of the most important historical resources for understanding the Roman legal and political system. Here we focus only on his political theory narrowly construed, part of his program to adapt Greek philosophy to Roman social and political purposes, bypassing even the extended defense of the role of oratory in political life that became something like a handbook for the study of rhetoric."

"Cicero bent Greek ideas to his vision of the idealized Roman Republic, and his understanding of the mores—the morality and social attachments—of the gentlemanly statesmen who would hold power in a just republic. Readers familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince will hear curious echoes of that work in Cicero’s advice; curious because the pieties of Cicero’s advice to the would-be statesman were satirized by Machiavelli sixteen hundred years later. If his philosophy was Greek and eclectic, Cicero owed his constitutional theory to Polybius; he was born soon after Polybius died, and read his history. And Cicero greatly admired Polybius’s friend and employer Scipio the Younger. There are obvious differences of tone. Polybius celebrated Rome’s achievement of equipoise, while Cicero lamented the ruin of the republic. Cicero’s account of republican politics veers between a “constitutional” emphasis on the way that good institutions allow a state to function by recruiting men of good but not superhuman character, and a “heroic” emphasis on the role of truly great men in reconstituting the state when it has come to ruin. Cicero’s vanity was so notorious that everyone knew he had himself in mind as this hero—had he not saved the republic before when he quelled the conspiracy of Catiline?"

"Cicero’s style is a key to the success of De officiis, and not just the literary style, but the political and intellectual style. Regulus aside, the demands of duty generally stretch only as far as the well-educated, well-to-do man is likely to follow. Thus, he insists, in a famous metaphor that Machiavelli later stood on its head, that courage is necessary but the courage of a human being is not the ferocity of the lion, just as wisdom is necessary but the intelligence of the human being is not the cunning of the fox."

"The very idea of a Christian political theology is problematic. If human beings are only transitorily on earth, and earth is but a vale of tears through which we must pass on our way to paradise, earthly politics loses almost all value. Life in the polis cannot be the good life for man, since fulfillment lies in the hereafter; here below, we must prepare for eternity. Earthly happiness for rational persons consists in whatever confidence they may entertain about the life hereafter. This “abstentionist” vision is in some ways at odds with the involvement of Christ in the everyday life of the community in which he spent his short life."

"I could never take seriously the standard view that historians should take ideas as give, and confine themselves to their effects; or even worse, the Marxist-cum-Freudian view that ideas have no independent effects, but are themselves the effects of economic or psychological causes. If one accepts that ideas shape events, then a historian has to be able to describe the ideas or doctrines relevant to his topic as accurately as can a theologian, a philosopher, or an economist. If that requires a specialised training, so be it. Any account of Keynes's influence that failed to engage with his 'theology' would be seriously incomplete as history."

"A work of genius is a complex object and there is light to be shed about what went into the making of it. Even in the case of scientific and mathematical achievement we can say a great deal about the existing state of knowledge, the problems it failed to address, why those problems were or had become interesting, the particular capacities which the solver brought to their solution. At the other extreme is a work of art which seems to have much more immediate roots in the personal life of the artist or writer. In between is the area in which Keynes worked, which was partly scientific, partly artistic. This gives a wide justification for a biographical approach. As I put it in the introduction to my first volume: 'If underlying Keynesian theory was Keynes's vision of his age, knowledge of his state of mind and the circumstances which formed it is essential, not only in order to understand how he came to see the world as he did, but also in order to pass judgement on the theory itself.'"

"Born in 1883 and dying in 1946, the bulk of Keynes's professional life was framed by two world wars. At the beginning, he was an Edwardian optimist, convinced that automatic progress was steadily enlarging opportunities for more and more people to live the 'good life', as identified by his mentor, G. E. Moore, and his friends of the Bloomsbury Group. He ended his life bequeathing the world a theory, policies and two international institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) designed to strengthen the foundations of free economy, so as to make it possible again for people to indulge the hopes with which he had grown up. In between, there was catastrophe and retrogression, starting in Europe and spreading to most of the rest of the world."

"Keynes's economic philosophy is thus made up of three interdependent parts: his technical macroeconomics, his embattled political philosophy and his ultimate ethical purpose."

"Maynard Keynes was born into a certain civilisation at a particular moment of history, and was one of its foremost products. He inherited both its aspirations and its tensions. He grew up in the shadow of its great figures, notably Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, the teachers and colleagues of his father. His style of thought and way of life both bear Cambridge's unmistakable imprint."

"Through Marshall's life and work the Victorian demand for authoritative social doctrine found one of its most important expressions in the Cambridge School of Economics. Maynard Keynes's relationship to that tradition is one of the central themes of this biography. That relationship was never unproblematic, because Marshall's achievement was incomplete. He had shown how the existing moral code could be made to serve society rather than God. But there was nothing in his work to show how it could be altered so as to make it possible for individuals to lead happier or more civilised lives. Marshall himself seems not to have felt any pressure to do so. But Sidgwick had, as had many other thinking Victorians. It was the reorganisation of personal life rather than the reorganisation of society which seemed the urgent problem for the next generation, especially once the soc ail and economic clouds of the 1880s and 1890s had given way to the bright sunlight of the Edwardian age."

"Keynes was one of those rare persons who can both think and act at the highest level. His life falls into cycles or phases, in which the emphasis shifts from one to the other. These shifts were related to what was happening in the world. At some times, particularly during the two world wars, there was a greater demand for Keynes's practical genius, and a greater satisfaction to be had from exercising it. But the cycles can also be seen in terms of action and reaction. Periods of great intellectual effort demand their release in practical activity, while practical activity prompts, sooner or later, a yearning for the cloister. Before 1914, Keynes's desire for the cloister was uppermost, partly because he was at this period most under the immediate influence of Moore's philosophy, partly because the nature of his sexual relations fitted private life better than public life ― a point of considerable importance even today, but more so then, when homosexual acts were illegal, and the danger of blackmail much greater."

"The Economic Consequences of the Peace has a claim to be regarded as Keynes's best book. In none of his others did he succeed so well in bringing all his gifts to bear on the subject in hand. Although the heart of the book was a lucid account of the reparation problem, the book was no mere technical treatise. The torrid mise-en-scène at Paris is vividly recreated; the failings of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George are displayed with cruel precision. The writing is angry, scornful and, rarely for Keynes, passionate: never again were his denunciations of bungling and lying, or his moral indignation, to ring so loud and clear. Giving shape to the whole is a brooding sense of menace; a sense of the impending downfall of a civilisation; of the mindless mob waiting to usurp the collapsing inheritance; of the futility and frivolity of statesmanship. The result is a personal statement unique in twentieth-century literature. Keynes was staking the claim of the economist to be Prince. All other forms of rule were bankrupt. The economist's vision of welfare, conjoined to a new standard of technical excellence, were the last barriers to chaos, madness and retrogression."

"What started Keynes on the road to the Keynesian Revolution was the incomplete British recovery from the depression of 1920 to 1922."

"It was his sense of the precariousness of capitalist civilisation which drew Keynes to monetary policy. Instability in the value of money was undermining the social contract on which capitalism was based."

"Keynes's politics of the Middle Way in the 1920s can be interpreted in two senses. It can be seen as an expression of an Aristotelian sense of balance, with both nineteenth-century individualism and twentieth-century communism being viewed as excesses of their virtues. Or Keynes can be seen as a prophet of individualism on the defensive. The institutions of society had become like rocks which required the most skillful circumnavigation if the ship of state were not to be smashed up. There was no margin left for stupidity, silliness or obsolete ideas in government. Only the most generous and disinterested spirit, equipped with high intelligence and scientific policies, could save the social order from shipwreck."

"Keynes was an applied economist who turned to inventing theory because the theory he had inherited could not properly explain what was happening."

"Keynes displayed an awesome array of talents, without being preeminent in any. He was not a genius in the sense of being a Divine Fool as was Mozart or Wittgenstein ― extraordinary at one thing, babyish in everything else. He was a wonderful all-rounder, with a superbly efficient thinking machine. At Eton he had excelled at mathematics and classics, and throughout his life he effortlessly bridged the two cultures. He was not a remarkable mathematician. Nor was he a great philosopher. As a historian he was an inspired amateur. He had a theory of politics, but it never saved him from the charge of being politically naive. Keynes was great in the combination of his gifts. His achievement was to align economics with changes taking place in ethics, in culture, in politics and in society ― in a word, with the twentieth-century spirit. But, like Jevons, his qualities never quite jelled. That, rather than too great a haste, is why he failed to produce a work of art, although his writings are full of artistry. His best stylistic achievements were in his shorter pieces ― notably his biographical essays. In his big books he was the pamphleteer trying to rein in his imagination, school himself to the demands of a formal treatise. He had powerful intuitions of logical and historical relationships, but was not at his happiest in sustained argument. Like Marshall, his concentration came in short bursts. His temperament was too restless, his mind too constantly active, and bursting out with ideas and plans, for thinking in solitude."

"The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a work of enduring fascination. It is simple and subtle, obscure and profound. It offered a systematic way of thinking not just about the behaviour of contemporary economies, but about the pitfalls in the quest for greater wealth at all times. It combined a vision of the future with a rigorous demonstration of the possibility of underemployment equilibrium. Although young economists of speculative bent were drawn to it as a storehouse of suggestive ideas, it was its practical usefulness which chiefly attracted them in a world poised between decaying democracy and rampaging dictatorship. At its core is a 'theory of output and employment as a whole', to distinguish it from the orthodox theory of what causes 'the rewards and distribution between different uses of a given quantity of resources' to be what they are. Keynes was the first economist to visualise the economy as an aggregate quantity of output resulting from an aggregate stream of expenditure. This new way of seeing the architecture of an economy is the General Theorys most enduring legacy."

"Like Odysseus, Keynes was a successful, not a tragic, hero. He heard the beautiful singing of the Sirens, but took precautions against being shipwrecked, keeping to the course for which his talents and the state of the world predestined him. Artfully, he strove for the best of all worlds, in his life and his work, and miraculously, came close to achieving it."

"History, politics, sociology, psychology and anthropology are suggestive, not conclusive, disciplines: they cannot prove (or more importantly disprove) any hypothesis. Economics should aim to be more like them and less like physics and maths. That is why I was drawn to Keynes: he was a man of many parts. I have heard economists say he was a brilliant thinker, but a bad theorist. They objected to his 'ad hoc' theorizing - inventing bits of theory to explain unusual events, rather than building up his theory from secure micro-foundations. His wife called him 'more than an economist'. I am less than an economist, but perhaps this makes me better able to appreciate his greatness."

"Keynes had a political objective. Unless governments took steps to stabilize market economies at full employment, much of the undoubted benefit of markets would be lost and political space would be opened up for extremists who would offer to solve the economic problem by abolishing markets, peace and liberty. This in a nutshell was the Keynesian 'political economy'. Keynes offers an immensely fruitful way of making sense of the slump now in progress, for suggesting policies to get us out of the slump, for ensuring, as far as is humanly possible, that we don't continue to fall into pits like the present one, and for understanding the human condition. These are the things which make Keynes fresh today."

"All epoch-defining events are the result of conjunctures - the correlation of normally unconnected happenings which jolts humanity out of its existing rut and sets it on a new course."

"To understand the crisis we need to get beyond the blame game. For at the root of the crisis was not failures of character or competence, but a failure of ideas."

"The reason why economics has given such a poor account of the origins of the crisis is that there is something essentially incompatible between the economist's view of individual rationality and systemic collapse. Without adding qualifications which strain their logic, economists cannot readily get from their picture of the the individual maximizing his utilities to booms and slumps and the persistence of depressions."

"The question remains: to what extent were the successes and failures of the golden age the result of Keynesian theory, however bastardized? The quick answer is: to a much greater extent in the former than in the latter. Keynesianism provided an analytical framework for organizing policy choices. It also provided ad hoc rationalizations for what governments wanted to do for other reasons. At the rhetorical level, these were important. They created the expectation that full employment would be maintained by policy. This reinforced the favourable background for business investment. To a more limited extent, Keynesian policy as practised in the 1 9 6os brought the golden age into crisis: but there were more profound reasons relating to the drift of social policy (sometimes called the 'revolution in entitlements'), the role of the United States in the world, and the weakness of the Bretton Woods system of international institutions. So the old coach did make a difference."

"Having said this, it is easy to see that he might have been deluding himself. He envisaged a modern capitalist economy governed by a Platonic ideal, and gentlemanly codes of behaviour. But once the capitalist genie is let out of the bottle it cannot be pressed into the service of a pre-modern ethics of the good life and pre-modern codes of behaviour. The good life in the classical sense presupposes that human desire has some ultimate end, or telos, whereas modern economic theory and life presuppose that it is insatiable. As regards behaviour, he took for granted a class-based system of values which economic progress was undermining. These were contradictions which Keynes never fully faced."

"In ethics Keynes was a Platonist, in politics he was an Aristotelian. His ethics pointed him towards the ideal; his politics towards moderation."

"Keynes's idea was very simple. Monetary and fiscal policy should have a single goal, jointly pursued, of maintaining a full employment level aggregate demand."

"Keynes is not just for the foxhole, but for the emerging world order."

"Let me start with a commercial: Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, and John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain are an extraordinarily wonderful set of biographies—everyone, I think, should read them: you should read a 2000 page biography of somebody at least once, and Keynes is at least as good a subject as anyone and better than almost everyone, and Skidelsky is a truly exceptional biographer."

"Skidelsky's beautifully structured narrative paints a picture of a man seeking to fashion the intellectual and practical tools to rescue the market economy from its own vices."

"Every economist should read Robert Skidelsky's biography of John May­nard Keynes (he's completed two volumes out of three projected)-even the numerous macroeconomists under age 40 who have not cracked The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and think them­selves wiser because they have not. Skidelsky's opus is a great bedtime read, reminding you of what a sensationally good economist Keynes was, because he was more. And it makes you think about where economics is going."

"One does not like to differ from a man without knowing the reasons which influenced him."

"A salvage service which hardly exceeds ordinary towage is naturally remunerated on a very different scale from an heroic rescue from imminent destruction."

"As no Court has ever attempted to define fraud, so no Court has ever attempted to define undue influence, which includes one of its many varieties."

"I take it that reasonable human conduct is part of the ordinary course of things."

"I do not wish to shake titles, and I shall do precisely what our predecessors have always done—leave the case where it is. It is a rock ahead that everybody knows."

"I think that common law is better than equity."

"A very ingenious attempt to drive a coach-and-four through this Act of Parliament."

"We, as lawyers, as men of business, as men of experience, know perfectly well what evils necessarily result from handing over a great family estate to a mortgagee in possession, whose only chance of getting his money is to sacrifice the interests of everybody to money-getting."

"There is nothing illegal in keeping up a tomb; on the contrary, it is a very laudable thing to do."

"The welfare of a child is not to be measured by money only, nor by physical comfort only."

"I do not see why, if we can tell what a man intends, and can give effect to his intention as expressed, we should be driven out of it by other cases or decisions in other cases. I always protest against anything of the sort."

"A proceeding may be perfectly legal and may yet be opposed to sound commercial principles."

"When we find a series of decisions running down from the time of Sir William Grant, we should be very cautious, and very slow to overrule them."

"I confess that when I am sought to be driven to a conclusion which appears to me unreasonable and unjust, I at once suspect the validity of the premises, even if I can detect no flaw in the reasoning from them."

"Trade unions up to a certain point have been recognised now as organs for good. They are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn, they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose."

"It appears to me wrong in principle for any Court or Judge to impose fetters on the exercise by themselves or others of powers which are left by law to their discretion in each case as it arises."

"I do not mean to say that the Court could not give leave to amend, but I cannot conceive that the Court would listen to an application for leave to amend after the trial. That could not have been intended: it would be opposed to all principles of justice."

"I know of no duty of the Court which it is more important to observe, and no powers of the Court which it is more important to enforce, than its power of keeping public bodies within their rights. The moment public bodies exceed their rights] they do so to the injury and oppression of private individuals, and those persons are entitled to be protected from injury arising from such operations of public bodies."

"Unless Parliament has conferred upon the Court that power in language which is unmistakable, the Court is not to assume that Parliament intended to do that which so seriously affect foreigners who are not resident here, and might give offence to foreign Governments. Unless Parliament has used such plain terms as show that they really intended us to do that, we ought not to do it."

"As proposals for estimating the social scarcity prices of natural resources remain contentious, economic accountants ignore them and governments remain wary of doing anything about them."

"In the quantitative models that appear in leading economics journals and textbooks, nature is taken to be a fixed, indestructible factor of production. The problem with the assumption is that it is wrong: nature consists of degradable resources."

"There are still people who discuss industrialization as... an alternative to agricultural improvement... this approach is without meaning in the West Indian Islands. There is no choice... between industry and agriculture. The islands need as large agriculture as possible... It is not ... that agriculture cannot continue to develop if industry is developed … the opposite is true: agriculture cannot... yield a reasonable standard of living unless new jobs are created off the land"

"I had no idea in 1933 what economics was, but I did well in the subject from the start, and when I graduated in 1937 with first class honours LSE gave me a scholarship to do a PhD in industrial economics."

"My interest in overhead costs was the structure of prices in situations where average cost per unit exceeds marginal cost. The Pareto rule was that price should equal marginal cost, but to apply this rule would bankrupt the firm. In practice, such situations oscillate between bankruptcy and monopoly, as in the airline industry today. The general inclination of economists in those cases was to enforce marginal pricing and subsidize firms to the extent of the differences between marginal and average cost. This was hardly practical, as an industry-wide policy. Neither could it be justified, as many taxpayers would be forced to pay for services that they did not use. If one started from the premise that those who use the service should pay for it, the problem reduced to how to spread the fixed costs among the users. Here I started from the railway principle of “charging what the traffic will bear” and linked up with the new price discrimination theory, as elaborated by Joan Robinson. Another aspect of overhead costs was the time dimension. Demand was not steady, but fluctuated. If the output could not be stored, there would be times of idle capacity, regular or irregular; how was the cost of this to be shared? I demonstrated that the correct approach to this problem was to treat the fixed investment as a producer in joint cost of different outputs at different times, each paying what it could bear, and subject to the sum of payments not exceeding total cost."

"A number of developing countries had been developing for a long time: Ceylon, for example, for a hundred years. Why was the standard of living of the masses still so low? One could understand this for much-exploited South Africa, but how for fairly enlightened Ceylon? The answer to both questions came by breaking an intellectual constraint. In all the general equilibrium models taught to me the elasticity of supply of labor was zero, so any increase in investment increases the demand for labor and raises wages. Instead, make the elasticity of supply of labor infinite, and my problems are solved. In this model growth raises profits because all of the benefits of advancing technology accrue to employers and to a small class of well-paid workers that emerges in an urban sea of a low-wage proletariat. In the commodities market an unlimited supply of tropical produce also gives the benefit of advancing technology to the industrial buyers, by the process already described."

"I make the point to remind you, if reminder be necessary, that the study of economic growth is still in its infancy. Countries rise up and fall, and we are not in a position to predict which ones will do best or worst over the next twenty years. This is equally true of developed and developing countries. Economics is good at explaining what has happened over the past twenty years, but when we turn to predicting the future it tends to be an essay in ideology."

"Looking backward over my life, it has been a queer mixture. I have lived through a period of transition and therefore know what it is like at both ends, even though the transition is not yet completed. I have been subjected to all the usual disabilities—refusal of accommodations, denial of jobs for which I had been recommended, generalized discourtesy, and the rest of it. All the same, some doors that were supposed to be closed opened as I approached them. I have got used to being the first black to do this or that, which gets to be more difficult as the transition opens up new opportunities. Having to be a role model is a bit of a strain, but I try to remember that others are coming after me, and that whether the door will be shut in their faces as they approach will depend to some small extent on how I conduct myself. As I said at the beginning, I had never intended to be an economist. My mother taught us to make the best of what we have, and that is what I have tried to do."

"Quickly gaining the attention of the leadership of colonized territories, he helped develop blueprints for the changing relationship between the former colonies and their former rulers. He made significant contributions to Ghana's quest for economic growth and the West Indies' desire to create a first-class institution of higher learning serving all of the Anglophone territories in the Caribbean."

"Economics takes a while to learn, even if much of it is in a way quite simple. It is simple to be wrong as well as to be right, and it is none too easy to distinguish between them."

"I must confess that I had expected the rigorous analysis of income taxation in the utilitarian manner to provide arguments for high tax rates. It has not done so."

"The income tax is a much less effective tool for reducing inequalities than has often been thought."

"An approximately linear income tax schedule is desirable; and in particular negative income tax proposals are strongly supported,"

"What does an income tax schedule look like, which takes account of the trade-off between equity and efficiency? This question was first asked by Mirrlees (1971) who developed the standard model of the optimal nonlinear income tax. Since then innumerable papers have generalized, refined, or corrected his analysis. It has also been realized that the second-best approach to income taxation pertains to a wide variety of economic problems such as monopoly pricing or contract theory in general. In this respect Mirrlees’ article has opened an important and fascinating strand of economic thought."

"Time, as we experience it, is continuous; it contains no discrete “events.” The events are put there by reflection on the past. As the past becomes more remote the remembered events become fewer in num­ ber and more limited in kind. It is for psychologists to say just why we remember this and forget that, but at the end of the day, the remembered past reflects our interests. It makes us what we are now."

"Records are preserved because they provide a charter for what historians believe about the present. Different historians may believe different things, and the records are interpreted (and modified) accordingly."

"In this essay I am mainly concerned with one particular case in which an oral tradition has been treated as if it were a datable written record and myth has been confused with history as it actually happened."

"I am well aware that for an outsider to attempt to bring about a shift in this entrenched paradigm is like trying to cut down a 300-year-old oak tree with a penknife. But the job will have to be done one day."

"History is only true for the time being; each new generation of scholars rewrites the work of its predecessors. But such revisers rarely go back to the beginning and start from scratch. Instead they build uncritically on “generally accepted” foundations laid down by their predecessors. These traditional, established truths of history have a large symbolic component of which their exponents are usually unaware."

"The history of European colonialism covers many centuries and takes diverse forms, but whereas the European explorers and conquerors of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania usually took it for granted that the local inhabitants could be enslaved or butchered or driven into the hinterland at the whim of the invaders, the literate nations of Asia were initially treated as peoples toward whom the courtesies of European diplomacy should be applied. At the end of the day these Asian civilizations were likewise mostly subdued by force of arms, but such conquest needed some kind of moral justification, a mythical charter. The Rig Veda as interpreted by Max Müller and his contemporaries provided just such a myth."

"It had the following form: Away back, long before the dawn of true history, Aryan invaders (who spoke a proto-European language and were therefore close kin to the Greeks, Romans, and Persians, who were the acknowledged founders of European civilization) had brought the first civilization to India, establishing themselves as an elitist military aristocracy among a population of barbarian serfs. They followed the precepts of a morally pure religious system, “The Vedic Religion,” which was very different from “the modem Brahmanic religion, as founded in the Puranas and Tantras, [which] consists in a belief in Vishnu, Siva and Brahma, and manifests itself in the worship of the most hideous idols”. After many centuries, during which the high culture of these original Aryans gradually decayed into gross immorality and superstition, a new wave of Indo-Europeans was now repeating the process. Once again the conquerors were establishing themselves as an elitist military aristocracy under the banner of a morally pure religion (Christianity)."

"If we accept all this, then the Aryan invaders appear as a race of chariot-riding heroes who conquer a population of servile peasant barbarians, the Dasa (Dasyu). This is a familiar story. Crossland, writing as a skeptic about traditions concerning the origin of Greco-Roman civilization, remarks: ‘The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to the decadant south’ (1971:826). Where India is concerned, the construction of this mytho-history was complete by 1920 and it was being written about as if it were fully authenticated history…."

"Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda , who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization who were destined to subordination because of their dark skins. The Aryan invaders could still be considered the originators of Indian civilization because they wiped out by fire and slaughter whatever was there before."

"...nothing in the archeological record suggests that the Ganges plain society was radically discontinuous from its Indus predecessor. Nor is there any independent archeological evidence for a massive intrusion of foreigners from the northwest. The suggestion in parts of the recent archeological literature that such evidence does exist is quite misleading. The “Painted Grey Ware Culture” of these writers would never have been interpreted as such if they had not started out by treating the Rig Veda as a history book."

"In other words, the prominent place given to horses and chariots in the Rig Veda can tell us virtually nothing that might distinguish any real society for which the Rig Veda might provide a partial cosmology. If anything, it suggests that in the real society (as opposed to its mythological counterpart), horses and chariots were a rarity, ownership of which was a mark of aristocratic or kingly distinction."

"Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?"

"At one time social anthropologists used to complain that their archeologist colleagues had no sense of the overall coherence of human societies. Now, under the influence of Dumézil, who was himself in­ fluenced by Durkheim and Granet, most of the prehistorians who have specialized in India and Pakistan and most of their Indo- Europeanist philological colleagues have become committed to a functionalism of a wholly naive sort. They seem to assume that cultural systems and language systems are bonded together and intrinsically stable over long periods of time. If societies are left alone, they stay put; otherwise, they roll across the landscape like impermeable billiard balls. If the archeological record shows that in fact changes have occurred, their occurrence is always explained as the consequence of a movement of population that carries with it the products (both material and immaterial) of a preexisting, alien, self-contained culture. As a rule, the alleged movement of people takes the form of a military conquest. The mythology of the Dorian invaders of ancient Greece who reduced their Ionian predecessors to serfdom matches point for point the mythology of the Aryan invasion of northern India."

"The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)"

"Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion? In some cases the association seems to be a matter of intellectual inertia."

"Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population!"

"The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework. Just as each member of the total family of Indo-European languages is lineally descended from one or another of a number of extinct “protolanguages,” so also are the speakers of these languages; hence the people who speak any particular language constitute an independent racial stock."

"Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED."

"The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history."

"Yet here is precisely where anthropologists might make a useful contribution, if only their scholarly associates would stop thinking of the Rig Veda as a garbled history book."

"The Aryan invasions never happened at all. Of course no one is going to believe that."

"In a 1967 article, “Virgin Birth,” Leach astutely foreshadowed the reflexivity of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, calling attention to the fact that anthropologists call their own practice religion but assert that other peoples practice magic. In the present volume he presents the dramatic case of the fabrication of the Aryan invasion, which shows how profoundly the seemingly objective academic endeavors are af­ fected by the mentalité of the culture to which they belong. Leach de­ scribes how cherished but erroneous assumptions in linguistics and anthropology were accepted without question. If the mentalité of the academic culture was in part responsible for the fabrication, geo­ politics was even more responsible for upholding the Aryan invasion as history. The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization needed a mythical charter to serve as the moral justification for colonial ex­ pansion. Convenient, if not consciously acknowledged, was the Aryan invasion by a fair-skinned people, speaking the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, militarily conquering the dark- skinned, peasant Dasa (Dasyu), who spoke a non-European language and with whom the conquerors lived, as Leach puts it, in a “system of sexual apartheid.” The first civilization in India, thus, was built by the Aryan invaders. A remarkable case of Orientalism indeed."

"The economist studies the disposal of scarce means. He is interested in the way different degrees of scarcity of different goods give rise to different ratios of valuation between them, and he is interested in the way in which changes in conditions of scarcity, whether coming from changes in ends or changes in means—from the demand side or the supply side—affect these ratios. Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

"It has been the object…to show that if recovery is to be maintained and future progress assured, there must be a more or less complete reversal of contemporary tendencies of governmental regulation of enterprise. The aim of governmental policy in regard to industry must be to create a field in which the forces of enterprise and the disposal of resources are once more allowed to be governed by the market.But what is this but the restoration of capitalism? And is not the restoration of capitalism the restoration of the causes of depression?If the analysis of this essay is correct, the answer is unequivocal. The conditions of recovery which have been stated do indeed involve the restoration of what has been called capitalism. But the slump was not due to these conditions. On the contrary, it was due to their negation. It was due to monetary mismanagement and State intervention operating in a milieu in which the essential strength of capitalism had already been sapped by war and by policy. Ever since the outbreak of war in 1914, the whole tendency of policy has been away from that system, which in spite of the persistence of feudal obstacles and the unprecedented multiplication of the people, produced that enormous increase of wealth per head…. Whether that increase will be resumed, or whether, after perhaps some recovery, we shall be plunged anew into depression and the chaos of planning and restrictionism—that is the issue which depends on our willingness to reverse this tendency."

"I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see be forgotten. […] Now I still think that there is much in this theory as an explanation of a possible generation of boom and crisis. But, as an explanation of what was going on in the early ’30s, I now think it was misleading. Whatever the genetic factors of the pre-1929 boom, their sequelae, in the sense of inappropriate investments fostered by wrong expectations, were completely swamped by vast deflationary forces sweeping away all those elements of constancy in the situation which otherwise might have provided a framework for an explanation in my terms. The theory was inadequate to the facts. Nor was this approach any more adequate as a guide to policy. Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and the easing of capital markets by fostering the disposition to save and reducing the pressure on consumption was completely inappropriate. To treat what developed subsequently in the way which I then thought valid was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulants to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating."

"I picked up a copy of Lionel Robbins’s 1934 book The Great Depression in a used book shop in Norwich. It's quite revealing: judicious in tone, full of tables and facts, clearly meant to be seen as the work of a wise observer – indeed, a Very Serious Person.And utterly, utterly wrongheaded"

"Lionel Robbins's The Great Depression (Macmillan, 1934) is one of the great economic works of our time. Its greatness lies not so much in originality of economic thought, as in the application of the best economic thought to the explanation of the cataclysmic phenomena of the Great Depression. This is unquestionably the best work published on the Great Depression. … To his work, Robbins brought a clarity and polish of style that I believe to be unequalled among any economists, past or present. Robbins is the premier economic stylist."

"Cambridge theories of value and distribution themselves suffer from the very malady which they hope to cure: rhetoric apart, they are deeply infected by static, equilibrium analysis of maximizing economic agents, acting with full information in a world of perfect certainty, as in the orthodoxy they deplore. … If there is something wrong with neo-classical economics – as there may well be – the Cambridge theories share all of its weaknesses and practically none of its strengths."

"Joan Robinson's much-awaited textbook in “modern economics” perfectly exemplifies the typical attitude of Cambridge economists to micro-economics. The whole of traditional price theory is covered in one chapter … [some] prices are formed by conventional mark-ups on prime costs, the level of the mark-up itself being left unexplained. Apart from this chapter, the book is doggedly macro-economic in treatment … A striking omission from the book is any mention of the closely related concepts of externalities and public goods, which most economists would nowadays regard as the basic ingredients of “market failure” that has come to be fruitfully applied … to problems of pollution and congestion."

"Nothing is more difficult than to turn and entire discipline around, asking itself to jettison its own history over the last 200 years."

"Despite entries on socialism, socialist economics and market socialism, and biographical entries on Oskar Lange and Ludwig von Mises, the Socialist Calculation Debate, so crucial in the revival of general equilibrium theory and the rise of modern welfare economics in the 1930s, is nowhere discussed at length in The New Palgrave."

"The history of economic thought is irrepressible. It would survive even if it were banned … it would be carried on in secret in underground organizations. Many economists denigrate the history of economics as mere antiquarianism but, in fact, they have deluded ideas about the history of their own subject. After all, whenever anyone has a new idea in economics, whenever anyone hankers to start a new movement or school of thought, what is the first thing he or she does? Why, it is to rummage the attic of past ideas to establish an appropriate pedigree for the new departure. … Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall and Keynes all drew on the history of economics to show that they had predecessors and forerunners; even Milton Friedman, when he launched the monetarist counterrevolution against Keynes, could not resist the temptation to quote David Hume over and again. The history of economic thought cannot be abolished and, were its study declared illegal, it would be studied in basements behind locked doors."

"Modern Austrian economists go so far as to suggest that the Walrasian approach to the problem of multimarket equilibrium is a cul de sac: if we want to understand the process of competition, rather than the equilibrium end-state achieved by competition, we must begin by discarding such static reasoning as is implied by Walrasian GE theory. I have come slowly and extremely reluctantly to the view that they are right and that we have all been wrong."

"The Lange idea of managers following marginal cost-pricing rules because they are instructed to do so, while the central planning board continually alters the prices of both producer and consumer goods so as to reduce their excess demands to zero, is so administratively naive as to be positively laughable. Only those drunk on perfectly competitive, static equilibrium theory could have swallowed such nonsense. ... in all the recent calls for reform of Soviet bloc economies, no one has ever suggested that Lange was of any relevance whatsoever. And still more ironically, Lange’s “market socialism” is, on its own grounds, socialism without anything that can be called market transactions."

"Modern economics is “sick”. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences. Economists have gradually converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigor as understood in math departments is everything and empirical relevance (as understood in physics departments) is nothing. If a topic cannot be tackled by formal modelling, it is simply consigned to the intellectual underworld. To pick up a copy of American Economic Review or Economic Journal, not to mention Econometrica or Review of Economic Studies these days is to wonder whether one has landed on a strange planet in which tedium is the deliberate objective of professional publication. Economics was condemned a century ago as “the dismal science”, but the dismal science of yesterday was a lot less dismal than the soporific scholasticism of today."

"There were many Hayeks: Hayek, the political scientist; Hayek, the economist; Hayek, the philosopher of social science; Hayek, the psychologist. Even in these different roles, he played many parts."

"Hayek's career raises many puzzles and sometimes takes on the appearance of an endless trail of unresolved or only partly resolved issues."

"Why did his interest in the concept of spontaneous order and the history of the doctrine of unintended social consequences undergo very little development after the 1960s? All of his political writings are in fact amazingly repetitious, exploring a small number of big themes which, however, are not further refined or extended in new contexts. As organizing concepts, they held, I am convinced, enormous potentialities but nevertheless Hayek himself failed to realize them."

"A 'popular libertarianism' might ... feel all that needs to be done to bring the world to justice is to institute the minimal state now, starting as it were from present holdings. On this view, then, libertarianism starts tomorrow, and we take the present possession of property for granted."

"Organizational design often focuses on structural alternatives such as matrix, decentralization, and divisionalization. However, control variables (e.g., reward structures, task characteristics, and information systems) offer a more flexible approach. The purpose of this paper is to explore these control variables for organizational design. This is accomplished by integration and testing of two perspectives, organization theory and economics, notably agency theory. The resulting hypotheses link task characteristics, information systems, and business uncertainty to behavior vs. outcome based control strategy. These hypothesized linkages are examined empirically in a field study of the compensation practices for retail salespeople in 54 stores. The findings are that task programmability is strongly related to the choice of compensation package. The amount of behavioral measurement, the cost of measuring outcomes, and the uncertainty of the business also affect compensation. The findings have management implications for the design of compensation and reward packages, performance evaluation systems, and control systems, in general. Such systems should explicitly consider the task, the information system in place to measure performance, and the riskiness of the business. More programmed tasks require behavior based controls while less programmed tasks require more elaborate information systems or outcome based controls."

"Recent organizational approaches to control (e.g., Ouchi 1979) suggest two underlying control strategies. On the one hand, control can be accomplished through performance evaluation. Performance evaluation refers to the cybernetic process of monitoring and rewarding performance. This strategy emphasizes the information aspects of control. Namely, to what degree can the various aspects of performance be assessed? Alternatively, control can be achieved by minimizing the divergence of preferences among organizational members. That is, members cooperate in the achievement of organizational goals because the members understand and have internalized these goals. This strategy emphasizes people policies such as selection, training, and socialization."

"Agency theory is an important, yet controversial, theory. This paper reviews agency theory, its contributions to organization theory, and the extant empirical work and develops testable propositions. The conclusions are that agency theory (a) offers unique insight into information systems, outcome uncertainty, incentives, and risk and (b) is an empirically valid perspective, particularly when coupled with complementary perspectives. The principal recommendation is to incorporate an agency perspective in studies of the many problems having a cooperative structure."

"We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn’t destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there’s a better way: By developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems."

"Hitler was ‘an enemy of free-market economics’ and a ‘reluctant dirigiste.’"

"[T]here could be no guarantee in a free market that the interests of race or state as Hitler defined them would take priority over the interests of businessmen or consumers. After 1933 the role of the state in regulating and directing economic life increased sharply, first in order to encourage economic revival, then to divert economic resources to the growth of German military power… [which] led, in an unplanned, incremental way, to the establishment of a kind of command economy."

"Indeed, many businessmen seem on the evidence to have been wary of the closet anti-capitalism of the rank-and-file Nazis."

"During the years that followed, Hitler and the Nazi movement were anything but the tools of German big business."

"When the regime wanted additional industrial capacity or resources for the military economy which the private sector could not provide, it was created (or conquered) by the state… during the Third Reich state ownership expanded into the productive sectors, based on the strategic industries, aviation, aluminum, synthetic oil and rubber, chemicals, iron and steel, and army equipment. Government finances for state-owned enterprises rose from RM 4,000m in 1933 to RM 16,000m 10 years later; the capital assets of state-owned industry doubled during the same period; the number of state-owned firms topped 500."

"The outcome [of the Nazi economy] was a command economy, governed by military priorities, but run by a coalition of state officials, soldiers, party hacks and industrial technocrats."

"Industry was regarded entirely instrumentally by party, state and military, in terms of its ability to provide the sinews of war… The business community was characterized by a defensive opportunism in the face of state power."

"Historians now debate whether Britain had a ‘managed economy’ by 1939, the very term—die gelenkte wirtschaft—adopted by German economists in the 1930s to describe the Nazi economy."

"Nazi political hegemony in the end prevented German capitalists from acting as capitalists."

"In the long run the [Nazi] movement was moving to a position in which the economic New Order would be controlled by the Party through a bureaucratic apparatus staffed by technical experts and dominated by political interests, not unlike the system that had already been built up in the Soviet Union."

"Göring industrial empire represented, in this sense, one of the major steps towards restricting private industrial capitalism and substituting a ‘völkisch’, state-run industrial economy."

"The [Nazi] regime was also able to use the state-owned multi-nationals as a ‘battering ram’ for entering economies that were not occupied territory."

"Some big businessmen did contribute to the Nazi election funds but German capitalism cannot be regarded, on the evidence, as having collectively brought fascism to power in any direct sense. Fascism in Germany was a mass movement brought to power through collusion with a bankrupt but traditional elite, not as the puppet of big business."

"It has been estimated that about one-fifth of Nazi voters and members were drawn from the manual work-force. After 1933 the number of workers in the Nazi Party went up, a product of opportunism perhaps as much as conviction."

"In a remark made in 1932 to Otto Wagener, one of the party’s economic experts, Hitler observed that the business bourgeoisie “know nothing except their profit. ‘Fatherland’ is only a word for them.”"

"Since the 1970s, interest in economic methodology has grown dramatically, to the extent that it is now possible to view methodology as a clearly identifiable sub-discipline within economics."

"Following the financial crisis of September 2008 when the American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, threatening to engulf the entire banking system, the British economist John Maynard Keynes returned to center stage. In the popular press and in the writings of many economists, Keynes featured prominently as governments around the world urgently sought ways to avoid economic collapse. (...) After only a brief delay, critics of Keynes’s ideas also began to appear; but the emergence of such critics only served to emphasize the fact of his return, for only a few years earlier Keynes’s name would not even have appeared in public debate about economic policy: his ideas were seen as having so little relevance that it did not even seem necessary to mention his name when discussing the performance of the economy."

"In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one."

"As the title of his 1941 book indicates, the theory of capital lay at the heart of his theory of the cycle. The reason is that he attributes the cycle not to changes in aggregate demand, or even to changes in the quantity of capital, but to changes in the structure of production and hence the structure of the capital stock. In this, his theory was highly unusual: one of the reasons for his failure to engage more effectively with Keynes was the latter’s inability to see how the theory of capital could be of any importance for the cycle. Because the theory of capital is so central, and because it is so complex, it needs to be explained carefully. After that, the rest of his theory falls into place comparatively easily."

"A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, in quick succession, but he may also exercise power over him by shaping or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?"

"We should never forget that Gautama was born and brought up a Hindu and lived and died a Hindu. His teaching, far-reaching and original as it was, and really subversive of the religion of the day, was Indian throughout. He was the greatest and wisest and best of the Hindus."

"[Gautama Buddha] ‘was the only man of our own race, the only Aryan, who can rank as the founder of a great religion’ [and that therefore] ‘the whole intellectual and religious development of which Buddhism is the final outcome was distinctively Aryan, and Buddhism is the one essentially Aryan faith’ (1896:185), [which] ‘took its rise among an advancing and conquering people full of pride in their colour and their race… ‘ (1896:187).”"

"In his researches, Grünendahl (2012:194) has checked Rhys-Davids’ writings and discovered a telling example of how the racialist “NS” worldview was already present in Britain earlier: “However, a more important factor seems to me to be Rhys Davids’s racialist—or more precisely Aryanist—bias, documented, for example, in statements to the effect that Gautama Buddha ‘was the only man of our own race, the only Aryan, who can rank as the founder of a great religion’ and that therefore ‘the whole intellectual and religious development of which Buddhism is the final outcome was distinctively Aryan, and Buddhism is the one essentially Aryan faith’ (1896:185), which ‘took its rise among an advancing and conquering people full of pride in their colour and their race... ‘(1896:187).”"

"It doesn’t take much refection—and indeed only a little research—to discover that the kind of conservative readings of the Genesis story that are often put up in opposition to what it is thought Darwin said (often without bothering to read what Darwin himself had to say) bear almost no relation to what we find in the refection of the fathers on the account found in Genesis. Such Christians have imagined a tradition that has no right to call itself tradition."

"These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro."

"Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to [Aurel] Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus."

"Indians have always been justly proud of their age-old civilization and believing that this civilization was as ancient as any in Asia, they have long been hoping that archaeology would discover definite monumental evidence to justify their belief. This hope has now been fulfilled."

"There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens."

"Hitherto it has commonly been supposed that the pre‐Aryan peoples of India were on an altogether lower plane of civilization than their Aryan conquerors … Never for a moment was it imagined that five thousand years ago, before ever the Aryans were heard of, the Panjab and Sind, if not other parts of India as well, were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own, closely akin but in some respects even superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet this is what the discoveries at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have now placed beyond question. (Marshall, 1931: v)"

"Taken as a whole, their [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as *hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism….* One thing that ‘stands out both at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped on Indian soil, with many millennia of human endeavour behind it."

"Marshall thus provided the foundation for a regional myth in India to assist perhaps innocently the 'divide and rule' policy of British Imperialism."

"‘For a civilization so widely distributed as that of the Indus no uniform ending need be postulated.’"

"The anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappa remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable to the present day."

"Archaeology is not a science, it’s a vendetta."

"The Aryan invasion of the Land of Seven Rivers, the Punjab and its envi- rons, constantly assumes the form of an onslaught upon the walled cities of the aborigines. For these cities the term used in the ¸igveda is pur, mean- ing a “rampart,” “fort” or “stronghold.” . . . Indra, the Aryan War god, is puraydara, “fort-destroyer.” He shatters “ninety forts” for his Aryan protégé Divodasa. [. . .] Where are – or were – these citadels? It has in the past been supposed that they were mythical, or were “merely places of refuge against attack, ramparts of hardened earth with palisades and a ditch.” The recent exca- vation of Harappa may be thought to have changed the picture. Here we have a highly evolved civilization of essentially non-Aryan type, now known to have employed massive fortifications, and known also to have dominated the river-system of north-western India at a time not distant from the likely period of the earlier Aryan invasions of that region. What destroyed this firmly settled civilization? Climatic, economic, political deterioration may have weakened it, but its ultimate extinction is more likely to have been completed by deliberate and large-scale destruction. It may be no mere chance that at a late period of Mohenjo-daro men, women and children appear to have been massacred there. On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused."

"Wheeler (1968, 3rd edition) proposed the following: It is, simply, this. Sometime during the second millennium B.C. – the middle of the millennium has been suggested, without serious support – Aryan-speaking peoples invaded the Land of Seven Rivers, the Punjab and its neighboring region. It has long been accepted that the tradition of this invasion is reflected in the older hymns of the Rigveda, the composi- tion of which is attributed to the second half of the millennium. In the Rigveda, the invasion constantly assumes the form of an onslaught upon walled cities of the aborigines. For these cities, the term used is pur, meaning a “rampart,” “fort,” “stronghold.” One is called “broad” ( prithvi) and “wide” (urvi). Sometimes strongholds are referred to metaphorically as “of metal” (dyasi). “Autumnal” (saradi) forts are also named: “this may refer to the forts in that season being occupied against the Aryan attacks or against inundations caused by overflowing rivers.” Forts “with a hundred walls” (satabhuji) are mentioned. The citadel may be of stone (afmanmayi): alternatively, the use of mud-bricks is perhaps alluded to by the epithet ama (raw, unbaked); Indra, the Aryan war-god is purandara, “fort-destroyer.” He shatters “ninety forts” for his Aryan protégé, Divodasa. The same forts are doubtless referred to where in other hymns he demolishes variously ninety-nine and a hundred “ancient castles” of the aboriginal leader Sambara. In brief, he renders “forts as age consumes garment.” If we reject the identification of the fortified citadels of the Harappans with those which the Aryans destroyed, we have to assume that, in the short interval which can, at the most, have intervened between the end of the Indus civilization and the first Aryan invasions, an unidentified but formidable civilization arose in the same region and presented an extensive fortified front to the invaders. It seems better, as the evidence stands, to accept the identification and to suppose that the Harappans of the Indus valley in their decadence, in or about the seventeenth century BC, fell before the advancing Aryans in such fashion as the Vedic hymns proclaim: Aryans who nevertheless, like other rude conquerors of a later date, were not too proud to learn a little from the conquered . . . (1968: 131–2)"

"The city, so far from being an unarmed sanctuary of peace, was dominated by the towers and battlements of a lofty man‐made acropolis of defiantly feudal aspect. A few minutes’ observation had radically changed the social character of the Indus civilization and put it at last into an acceptable secular focus. (Wheeler, 1955: 192)"

"One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan”"

"One terracotta, from a late level at Mohenjo-daro , seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan." He" notes as well, after referring to the bone of a camel recovered from a low level at Mohenjo-daro: "There is no evidence of any kind for the use of the ass or mule. On the other hand the bones of a horse occur at a high level at Mohenjo-daro , and from the earlier (doubtless pre-Harappan) layer at Rana Ghundai in northern Baluchistan both horse and ass are recorded. It is likely enough that camel, horse and ass were in fact all a familiar feature of the Indus caravans."

"One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that a jawbone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in Baluchistan."

"Since India’s and Pakistan’s independence, South Asian archaeology was significantly influenced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (born 1890, died 1976) and, to a lesser degree, by the late Stuart Piggott. Wheeler secured a reputation as one of the most prominent archaeologists in the English speaking world.... If Jones’ had his “philologer paragraph,” Wheeler had his “Aryan paragraphs” which directed archaeological, historical, linguistic, and biological interpretations within South Asian studies for over a half century."

"Given the charge of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944, when he was a brigadier in the British army fighting in North Africa, he revived the ASI and institutionalized a more rigorous stratigraphic method designed to record a site’s evolution period after period. Irascible but magnanimous, theatrical but hard-working, Wheeler energetically put his stamp on Indian archaeology. But having received his archaeological training in the context of the Roman Empire, he transferred its terminology wholesale to the Harappan cities, which thus became peppered with ‘citadels’, ‘granaries’, ‘colleges’, ‘defence walls’, etc., when no one, in reality, had a clue to the precise purpose of the massive structures that had emerged from the thick layers of accumulated mud."

"One important legacy of Wheeler's influence is an a priori acceptance by scholars of the use of migration and stimulus diffusion to describe all major South Asian discontinuities - beginning with the invention of agriculture and ending with the arrival of the British. Alternative explanations of cultural change are not considered. Wheeler's interpretations promoted an encapsulation of South Asian culture history into a series of chronologically and culturally distinct units focused on northern areas. It the became difficult to perceive or reconstruct a cultural account incorporating an integrated sub-continent. Recent archaeological data suggests fundamental interpretive changes are now warranted."

"Wheeler used all his talents and literary skill to Prove that the Indus Valley Civilization was the outcome of the Mesopotamian experiment in city-life; at one place he even goes to the extent of suggesting that the mastercraftsmen came from a foreign country to Mohenjodaro to build the first houses ! In other words, he looked at this civilization not as a ‘primary’ civilization, like that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, developing on its own soil and produced by its own genius, but as a secondary civilization built by the foreigners,"

"A great teacher and a great writer need not be an efficient supervisor."

"we could do a great deal worse than look back across the drift to the great reader Lewis. We need to try to recall what literature was; what it meant, and can still mean, to grasp literary works in memory."

"Leon Walras, the sun of one of the planetary systems in the universe of economics, developed a general equilibrium model of capital formation and credit, after he had explored models of exchange and production. But he was primarily concerned with momentary equilibrium to be established in a system with given stocks of capital goods that are shared among a given number of individuals."

"In the summer of 1975, I read Marx’s Economics by Michio Morishima (1973), a Japanese mathematical Marxist economist. I was excited by this book, for Morishima was using the tools I had learned in mathematical economics to study Marxist questions: exploitation, the labor theory of value, the transformation problem."

"The later Morishima’s dissatisfaction with the false sense of completed achievement―and the related smugness―of many pure theorists did make sense, and he was right to emphasize the need to seek constantly a fuller picture which could do justice to the reality around us, rather than seeing their separated investigations as the end of their task. All the constructive insights that the later Morishima offers become relevant when that exercise of broadening is undertaken. And yet, this does not require us to dismiss the nature of the contribution that the early Morishima made, or discard the contributions that old-fashioned economic theory has made and still makes to our understanding of the world. In defence of the latter claim, I offer the fact that even the highly oversimplified General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of that great abstractionist, John Maynard Keynes (1936), made a significant difference to public policy. I could refer also to the fact that, when Michio was trying to expand the education of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he had no hesitation in bringing in some results of fairly pure Marxian economic theory to the attention of a person with a very powerful voice in the real world; and Robert Runcie himself appreciated this fully. The relation between useful abstraction and underlying reality requires, I would argue, an enduringly dual approach."

"Pathology is the place where history talks with its loudest most grating voice."

"There is no third path and that is the one we are going to take."

"Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection, one of the most popular books of devotion in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has a long discussion on three ways of loving God."

"The term 'metaphysical poets' came into being long after the poets to whom we apply it were dead. Samuel Johnson, who coined it, did so with the consciousness that it was a piece of literary slang, that he was giving it a kind of nickname."

"Lewis established his reputation as a scholar with his first book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Traditions (1936). This remains a great and profoundly original contribution to literary history. Whether one agrees or disagrees, in detail or in large, with its thesis, after reading this book one's whole imagination of the past has been extended and changed. Lewis recovered for the ordinary reader what had been lost for centuries, the power to read allegory and to respond to the allegorical mode of thinking. He was able to do so because he was a born allegorist himself."

"The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman are distinguished from Eliot's earlier plays by their author's obvious desire to accomodate himself to the conventions of the stage at their most conventional level. In the earlier plays, Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion, Eliot was working in the experimental theatre of the 'thirties, using such devices as the chorus, the direct appeal to the audience, soliloquy, lyrical solos and duets, and ritual and symbolic acts. In these last plays he deliberately wrote within the limits of what has been contemptuously called the "West End Play", or what Mr. Terence Rattigan called "Plays for Aunt Edna"."

"What was the modern movement in English and American literature has now passed into history. We have to call it the 'modernist movement'. Its great figures—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens—are now well entrenched in academic syllabuses. The vultures and the crows have moved in over the old battlefields. Writers who once aroused a passionate enthusiasm and as passionate a disapproval are now the prey of bibliographers and textual critics, biographers and editors of letters, and students seeking doctorates."

"Steaming onwards to the south-east between Methana and Ægina, we passed close under the island of Poros, with its hilly slopes clothed with groves of citron, an island which once bore the name of Calaureia, and was the scene of the death of Demosthenes. It was here that he sought sanctuary from the emissaries of Antipater in the temple of Poseidon."

"'Philology' was for a long time limited to linguistic studies, and was regarded as only including grammar, lexicography, exegesis, and textual and literary criticism; but, since the time of Wolf, it has been generally understood in a wider sence, as including the study of ancient life in all its phases, as handed down to us in the literature, the inscriptions, and the monuments, of Greece and Rome ..."

"In Petrarch we readily recognise a link between the mediaeval and the modern world. He was fully conscious of belonging in a peculiar sense to a transitional time. He describes himself as placed on the confines of two peoples, and as looking backwards as well as forwards ..."

"Experimental Science is represented by Bacon, in the sixth part of the Opus Maius, as a general method for the purpose of checking the results reached by mathematical processes, and also of prompting further researches in fresh fields of inquiry. He saw its bearing and its importance as a universal method of research."

"Marian devotion is very deeply embedded in Ultramontane papalist Catholicism, and has been for centuries. The Virgin in the nineteenth century, apparitions of the Virgin, play an enormous part in focusing Catholic loyalty, Catholic identity, and also in offering a dimension of Christianity... If you've got a very rigid, hierarchical, masculinely-dominated form of Christianity, the tender, nurturing, feminine element in Christianity can only be rescued by some sort of balancing act. This I think was an enormous strength in nineteenth century Catholicism over and against say nineteenth century Fundamentalist Evangelicalism - with which it has a great deal in common in some respects - but where I think it has an edge is in this feminine dimension."

"The reason the Pope is the Pope is that he is the custodian of the relics of St Peter."

"I do not think there is a Christian shape to history in the sense that things move according to God's plan in any discernible way. I think a Christian approaches history with a sense that human life matters and has meaning and that it is both possible and important to tell the truth. Perhaps that constitutes a Christian approach to history because none of those things can be taken for granted now, even among people practicing history. There are people who practice history who think that it is a branch of the creative arts in the sense that we impose patterns on the past. I believe that we discover patterns in the past."

"Duffy's aim is to redress an old historiographical imbalance. He has admirably succeeded in this, even if at the cost of another imbalance. This is, as it stands, a very illuminating and satisfying book, which takes a major step towards better understanding of the English Reformation."

"The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge and a former president of Magdalene College, is the most important study of our time in the field of early modern English religious history. It has completely changed our view of the reception of Protestant theology under the Tudors."

"Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars takes its place besides A. G. Dickens' The English Reformation as a landmark book in the history of the Reformation, and with this book the author assumes commanding rank in the revisionist camp."

"The most beautiful history book of the year is Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570... Eamon Duffy examines surviving copies of the Book of Hours, the most intimate book of the late Middle Ages, tracing the marks left by readers — everything from laundry lists scribbled in the margins to personalised versions of prayers. This richly illustrated book takes us back into the hearts and souls of the English long ago."

"A leftist is a person who does leftist things, not one who claims to be one. The left is a way of life, not a manner of speech. Someone who likes to talk but not listen, who is not willing to stand up for those who are wronged, including their rivals, is not a leftist in my book. Defending your rival’s rights is the greatest virtue. This is why there is no such thing as a virtuous politician as far as I’m concerned. And if I continue to claim that I am a leftist, it is because I still hope for a more just distribution of wealth and an education system that teaches this virtue."

"It is not history’s duty to solve the problems of the future, but simply to remind us of the solutions that were chosen during similar situations. But history that teaches only one solution is a dangerous thing."

"I’m not scared of the far-right: It’s like a growing boil that needs to be lanced and I have a feeling it’s already happening."

"Yes, I haven’t changed my mind. For decades, anything that was decided in Europe came with a footnote, an asterisk, added by the British. But we can’t move forward with asterisks; they have to go."

"The French, you know, have a good quality: They don’t tolerate arrogance. I’m the same way. I voted for him, but when I heard him tell an unemployed man asking for a job to “go across the street” and get one, and especially after the cover-up of the Benalla scandal – when Macron’s security officer beat up a protester – he was finished as far as I was concerned."

"Hope is something to comfort the weak."

"We have come to the point of believing complacency to be a virtue. Yet complacency is the biggest form of cowardice. The worst thing we can do to our children is to teach them to remain quiet. In ancient Greece, during periods of crisis and division, citizens who would not take a position were fined. We tell our young people to be irresponsible, to stay off the pitch, instead of teaching them that we all need to be on the pitch and to fight. When you deny yourself the right of participation and choice, you’re denying your freedom."

"Greece and Europe have been intrinsically linked notions since the time of Herodotus. We need to remember that. And we need to learn to live in a European and globalized society without saying “us” and “them.”"

"Speaking as a historian, there has never been an empire that was not multinational."

"Europe has always been mixed-race, it has never had such a thing as biological purity. The crucial question today is how the migrants and refugees will be assimilated. Unfortunately, we continue making the same huge mistake – in Europe and in Greece. We treat foreign nationals like a separate community that cannot be assimilated. By doing so, we create a foreign territory within our own. The Arabs say that the land of Islam is wherever there is a single Muslim. The people coming to Greece, therefore, need to learn our language and customs, to be assimilated into Greek institutions in a manner that is not just restricted to the islands of the eastern Aegean and the hot spots, but which includes the entire country. We’re afraid of losing our culture by sharing it. But without contact with others, culture ceases being a culture."

"When the incompetent are allowed to govern, it is the fault of the able."

"Today, unfortunately, education does not start in the home and school is in no position to fill that void."

"I was always in favor of the term “New Macedonia,” because North Macedonia naturally suggests a South Macedonia and in this case, North Macedonia is a country and the South Macedonia that is implied is a region in another country."

"...In Oxford there was and is an enormous commitment to individual teaching, or teaching in very small numbers, and a real interest in the intellectual development of undergraduates."

"...As there was a growing pressure to publish, and publish to a deadline – which I think is a disaster, and has been an intellectual disaster..."

"...I believe that one of the great contributions of British historians of the 20th century to history and the historical profession has been their willingness to look beyond the British Isles."

"...The whole trend towards rather nit-picking revisionism. The old big picture often presented by Marxist or marxisant historians began to be eroded by a new generation, and I think the result all too often has been a narrowing of focus, a fragmenting of the discipline. And my whole life I’ve been trying to save the big picture and promote its virtues and its importance. I think at this moment we may be seeing a shift back to something rather larger, as against microhistory, and revisionist mini-history. There has been a growing realisation of the importance of a wider framework, and that framework may be pan-European, it may be Atlantic history, or increasingly, global history."

"I’ve always tried to keep in mind the big picture, which I believe is one of the biggest contributions of Marxist or marxisant historians to the historiography of the twentieth century. For all the flaws in the Marxist approach – and I could never accept the determinism that one finds even in Braudel (perhaps because of the influence of Butterfield I was always impressed by the role of personality and contingency in the development of historical events) – I was very aware of the interactions, imitations and parallel developments resulting from what in many respects were similar social and economic backgrounds."

"The younger generation think in terms of the present and the future, and they’ve lost a sense of what happened before their lifetimes. They’ve lost any notion of the complexities of the past, and the fact that statesmen were struggling with similar problems in the 17th century as in the late 20th – threats to the unity of a nation state that was moving towards the form of development that it would reach in the 19th century."

"I think it’s terribly important for the historian to take the alternative point of view to the fashionable one, and present the options. For instance, the assumption in much of the 19th and 20th centuries was that the centralised nation state was the culmination of a millennium of European history. What we now see as a result of the development of the European Community, of globalisation, of corporate institutions, and transnational corporate institutions, is that the nation state has been put under increasing pressure from above. And at the same time, and partly as a consequence of that, there’s increasing pressure from what you might call the under-represented or suppressed ethnic groups, regions and so on. So we’re getting these pressures on the 19th/20th century nation state both from above and from below."

"If you knew for instance, that British had been in Iraq in the 1920’s, and had run into problems there, this might at least make you pause before taking major policy decisions."

"I think one of the things that it is most important for historians to do is to deconstruct myths, and that when you get nationalist historiography, as in Serbia for instance, casting people in the role of permanent victims, and creating a very narrow focus, that’s really dangerous. It seems to me that our role is constantly to question the orthodoxy of the day."

"The life of a historian or any other academic is not very interesting - in fact it's quite boring. I read a great deal as a child..."

"In this globalized world, there is no such thing as independence."

"...In this globalized world, independence no longer exists. It is gladdening to see that we are part of a world in which we are all linked. There is also a thing called generosity: any people that thinks only of itself and is not generous with others is doing itself harm in the long run."

"I have always said that it is precisely at moments of economic difficulty when politicians emerge who want to take advantage of widespread discontent to impose their own agenda."

"For many years Madrid's policies were mistaken. If you compare the union of Scotland and England in 1707, for instance, with the Bourbons and Catalonia, you'll see that England immediately involved Scotland in its empire project. A great many Scots held important positions in government, as well as leading the economy over the following centuries. This did not happen with Catalonia."

"The Bourbons imposed an authoritarian rule in the 18th century, shutting down the regional parliaments and ruling from the center, making a balance between the innate diversity of Spain and the concept of a united Spain."

"In the second half of the 17th century, the Catalans saw that the relationship with Spain had failed, and so they rebelled against Philip V; then they realized that the French were no different. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Catalans began to see the opportunities that being in Spain presented. I think that, like the Scots, they took advantage of those opportunities. But historians are not prophets, and it now looks as though our two countries could break up."

"By definition a historian must be curious; that is what makes us look into the heart of societies. I think that I was surprised by the relative ease with which Spain moved from dictatorship to democracy after the death of Franco. But thinking about the impact of civil wars on societies I have reached the conclusion that the generation that grows up after a civil war has such terrible memories of what happened that it does everything possible to prevent a repetition in the future."

"We have to learn to navigate this globalized world. Instant communication has changed our lives; those crises of the 18th and 19th centuries were not known around the world, but now we know what is going on everywhere at any time. But we are also seeing a world in which the banks and the large multinationals are playing a bigger role than ever in making decisions about how we live. These supranational organizations are pressuring governments, and that is distancing government from the people. People want more control over their lives, which is why we are seeing a resurgence of regionalism, of ethnicity, of nationalism - everybody wants a place in the sun."

"As you write, it doesn’t matter what age you are. I think I’m a better historian now, at 75, than I was at 25."

"One of the ways in which all universities could contribute substantially to their home societies is by helping students obtain a better understanding of the development and interdependencies over time of our seemingly fragmented globe."

"Dramatic in their scope though the maritime empires once were, it is overland empires that have proved more resilient, and variations of them are still with us. The United States, Russia, China and India call themselves nation-states, but all of them are in reality products of, and marked by, different imperial enterprises; and their respective rulers on occasion still behave accordingly. Think of Donald Trump’s casual suggestion last August that the US purchase Greenland. At the time, many put this down to Trump being Trump. In fact, he was acting in conformity with many of his predecessors. US presidents proposed purchasing Greenland in the 1860s and 1940s, and American politicians did succeed in buying other vast tracts of land, Alaska, for instance, and the huge Louisiana Purchase in 1803."

"The men who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 were deploying technology that had taken decades to develop. Nonetheless, in carrying out that act, these US airmen did effect an almost immediate transformation in the nature of warfare and in attitudes towards it."

"Consider the terrible outbreak of plague in the 14th century known as the Black Death. Europe suffered disproportionately, losing perhaps 50 per cent of its total population. One result of this, however, was that the living standards and wages of many of those who survived seem to have improved. This, it has been suggested, led in time to a marked increase in Europeans’ food consumption and demand for consumer goods. And this rise in demand may well in turn have contributed to the increasing number of European trading voyages across the world’s oceans in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries."

"Given the current bitter polarisation of political allegiances, it is important to remember that national groupings have never been homogeneous and are rarely static. Of course, there are some persistent habits and patterns of thought and behaviour in all long-standing states. But countries and their populations are not just mixed in terms of ethnicity, politics, religion and much more, they also change over time, sometimes rapidly and radically."

"Perhaps the most recurring and paradoxical trigger of change in human society has been war."

"The second amendment, passed in 1791, allowing US citizens access to arms, was manageable when most firearms were muskets that took minutes to load."

"Now this doctrine of Carlyle, which the history of Nazism so aptly illustrates, depends upon two premisses of doubtful validity: firstly, that "greatness", or any other merely abstract conception, is desirable; secondly, that the human character is constant,—for a great man can clearly be trusted with absolute power only if his qualities remain "great". The opposite doctrine to this is the doctrine summarised by Lord Acton in his famous aphorism, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely": the doctrine that power is not merely the effective expression of a fixed character, but can affect and alter the character which exercises it. The history of Nazism suggests that this doctrine is true."

"I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes. I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx."

"Like seventeenth century visitors to Scotland, they [English historians] tend to dismiss it as a barbarous country populated only by doltish peasants manipulated, for their own factious ends, by ambitious noblemen and fanatical ministers. And equally, they see the English occupation of Scotland merely as imposed, for the sake of order, on an exhausted land. Even Scottish historians have hardly sought to fill this gap. As far as published work is concerned, the sociology of seventeenth Scotland remains a blank."

"England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus."

"Scotland had already had a religious revolution. By an irony which seems also a law of history, the new religion of Calvinism, like Marxism today, had triumphed not in the mature society which had bred it but in undeveloped countries where the organs of resistance to it were also undeveloped."

"After that date [1707], intelligent Scotchmen rejoiced in the removal of their national politics to London. That enabled them to get on with the long delayed improvement of their country which, till then, had remained, as they admitted, "the rudest of all the European nations". In the eighteenth century, the energy which had hitherto been wasted or frustrated in futile politics was devoted to "improvement" and the rudest of its nations became the admired model of Europe."

"It amuses me to hear some of my Scotch friends, who have leapt nimbly on to the new band-wagon, speaking as if, with independence, Scotland would be the same as before, only independent. Will it even be as large as before? The native historian of the Orkney Islands closes his work with the remark that the only advantage that the Orkney islanders gained from their annexation by Scotland in 1468 was "the ultimate advantage of annexation to Great Britain" in 1707. They may well prefer to be ruled by London rather than from Glasgow, to which political power in an independent Scotland will naturally gravitate, and where it will no doubt be exercised—since they too are good at that kind of politics—by the Irish. This will perhaps compensate them for their inability to rule the Scots of Ulster from captured Belfast."

"The Government spokesmen...insist that, once the assembly is established, the SNP will wither away... Thanks to the assembly, Scotch nationalism will have been scotched. The leaders of the SNP do not agree with this reasoning. If they did, they would oppose the assembly as an unacceptable substitute for their own essential demands, a stone offered instead of bread. In fact they have decided to vote for the assembly, confident that they can use it as a stepping-stone towards their own objective. For after all, they can say, the opportunities of making trouble in the assembly will be many. There can be disputes over the spending of the money, disputes over the restraints on the assembly, both political and financial. Even practical incompetence can be useful; for in every case the blame can be concentrated on a very convenient scapegoat, the reserved powers of Westminster. In this way the assembly, which has been devised to halt the advance of the SNP, will be an excellent means of accelerating that advance: an advance far beyond the limited aims of the government: an advance to sovereignty."

"To this the government reply is, in effect, "wait and see". We are assured that once the sensible Scots people have elected sensible, practical men to represent them in the assembly, all these grim forebodings will prove mistaken. The assembly-men will settle down and make good laws within the limits set, and the claims of the SNP will dissolve in mere noise."

"The Regius Professor's methods of quotation might also do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one."

"Allusions to "hidden counsels" and "mysterious reasons" are almost always the mark of doctrinal incoherence."

"In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created "in the image of God" and has from the beginning the status of one who is not a companion to the other animals but of one who dominates them."

"Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin."

"He saw in Falstaff...a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted."

"This was the crucial moment in the development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest things, the things upon which the fate of the soul depended, were put into ordinary, familiar, everyday words. Two men above all others, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, rose to the task. Without them, without the great English translation of the New Testament and the sonorous, deeply resonant Book of Common Prayer, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare."

"I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read."

"Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life."

"On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world."

"Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maestà, and then in Florence at Botticelli’s Primavera."

"A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure—an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation—characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet."

"The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul."

"Poggio Bracciolini was a book hunter, perhaps the greatest in an age obsessed with ferreting out and recovering the heritage of the ancient world. The finding of a lost book does not ordinarily figure as a thrilling event, but behind that one moment was the arrest and imprisonment of a pope, the burning of heretics, and a great culturewide explosion of interest in pagan antiquity. The act of discovery fulfilled the life’s passion of a brilliant book hunter. And that book hunter, without ever intending or realizing it, became a midwife to modernity."

"There was a time in the ancient world—a very long time—in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one’s head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being."

"Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity."

"What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism."

"The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life."

"The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent."

"The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear."

"The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things."

"Ever since I was quite young I’ve been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you — not just that you would find something, but that something would find you."

"Politicians are always invoking providence. Politicians are forced in America to behave as the political equivalent of those baseball players who hit home runs and run around, waving their hands up to heaven as if God was actually worrying about whether they were going to hit a home run or not, helping one team rather than the other! It’s a fantastic idea, but it’s somehow part of our popular culture and our politicians pay lip service to the same notion."

"Things change profoundly in the church after Luther. The church becomes much more embattled. It makes some attempts at internal reform. But it also makes very vigorous attempts to silence dissent. With some exceptions — I’m no historian of the Catholic church — but it seems to me that the church has never entirely, as it were, come out from the other side on the Council of Trent. It’s not an accident that the current Pope was the head of the [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], the ideological wing of the church [that led the inquisition]."

"As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare’s penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge truth—to possess it fully and not perish of it—through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance."

"Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions."

"Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld."

"Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restraints have all failed. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent."

"It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse."

"Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long. However cunning they were in their rise, once in power they were surprisingly incompetent. Possessing no vision for the country they ruled, they were incapable of fashioning enduring support, and though they were cruel and violent, they could never crush all of the opposition. Their isolation, suspicion, and anger, often conjoined to an arrogant overconfidence, hastened their downfall. The plays that depict tyranny inevitably end at least with gestures toward the renewal of community and the restoration of legitimate order."

"Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. "What is the city but the people?""

"Men write history for many reasons; to try to understand the forces which impel mankind along its strange course; to justify a religion, a nation, or a class; to make money; to fulfil ambition; to assuage obsession; and a few, the true creators, to ease the ache within."

"His [Winston Churchill's] violent disagreement with Neville Chamberlain did not spring solely from thwarted ambition or personal dislike. Such motives may have sharpened the phrases and honed his epigrams, but the long policy of appeasement, the weakening of Britain's world role, the acceptance of oppression and racialism were to Churchill a denial of England's historical destiny and, because a denial, bound to end in disaster."

"For many years, as a gloomy exercise, I used to look for British cars on the streets of New York and the best that I could hope for was a rare "mini" or a rarer Rolls-Royce. Now its streets are alive with Jaguars – a tribute to the new professionalism in British industry which goes right down to the shop floor, a professionalism, however, which still has to be extended and encouraged. This can only be done by continuing the policies upon which Mrs Thatcher's government has embarked – particularly in education where the need to instill professional qualities and to teach technological skills is paramount. It is only through well trained youth and expanding industry that new, real jobs can be created. Everyone to whom I spoke in America – senators, industrialists, bankers, publishers – from the left of the Democratic party to the right of the Republican spoke with admiration of Mrs Thatcher, not only of the part she is playing in nuclear disarmament but also of the way she has changed the image of Britain from one of collapse and decay to self-reliance and hope. They believe, and I agree, that a victory for Labour would be disastrous. Mr Kinnock and his colleagues possess neither the intellect, the foresight, the sense of human reality nor the creative imagination needed for leadership. They know they cannot convince so they attempt to bamboozle."

"Some years ago, Sir John Plumb, aware of the threat both to the general mind and to the survival of his profession that the undermining of ancient convictions could pose, in effect advised historians to write the sort of history that helps people towards a contented and more cheerful life. But surely that is to back corruption: we are not to tell what for good reason we believe to be much nearer the truth if it upsets people. Besides, it cannot be done. All history upsets some people: what Plumb really called for was the sort of history that supported the social attitudes, ambitions and behaviour that he preferred."

"He has always written to be read. He is always as concerned with the quality of his prose as he is with the quality of his argument or the precision of his evidence. In intention alone, such literary concern marks him out from the mass of practising academic historians, and the results of his endeavours mark him out even more clearly. His writing is, for pace, vigour and flow, unrivalled among contemporary historians and sometimes it is held to be too vivid. His figures of speech are not always appreciated by the profession: when he wrote, for instance, of Walpole's attempt to muzzle the youthful Chatham, "As well might he attempt to stop a hurricane with a hairnet", there were not a few reviewers who tut-tutted at the extravagance of the idea and its expression, but fortunately most have welcomed a writer who can present the product of massive scholarship elegantly and compactly and vividly. For his work can convey an unusual sense of intellectual excitement, and its polish and panache make him one of the most readable historians... He is a man to read for the larger scale and the developing vision. He is an historian to read for the changing relationship between political allies and rivals, for the battle between moral scruple and tactical skill in political factions, for the narrative curve of a politician's career, of the unfolding of a man's character in the face of opportunity, triumph, setback or defeat."

"I once wrote that I knew no one else who could at the same time master the technical problems of conveying the sweep of history – the tour d'horizon of international relations, balance of power, economic development, social structure, cultural achievement and national ambition – and at the same time study these landscapes of the past with perceptive and original interpretations of the major figures bestriding the stage he had set. Plumb switches from the telescope to the microscope with unusual ease."

"If boldly conceived, thoughtfully researched and elegantly written popular history is once again enjoying an extraordinary flowering in Britain, it was Sir John Plumb who planted the seeds, and tended the garden, while himself producing some of its most dazzling blooms. From the beginning of his career to its end he never wavered from the view that history's vocation might begin in the academy, but it should not end there; that as an illumination of the human condition, the "interpreter of its destiny", it was too important to be confined to the intra-mural disputes of the professionals."

"In 1950 Plumb was confident enough to write for "The Pelican History of England" his justly famous masterpiece of compression, England in the Eighteenth Century, with its shrewd thumbnail sketches of the powerful and its unforgettable social scene-painting. On its pages countless readers smelled the London streets as well as the nose on a Houghton Bordeaux. It was, in miniature, writing of the kind Plumb admired in his literary epigones such as Sterne and Rabelais."

"Creative energy is one of Professor Plumb's most obvious gifts – another is his sense of reality. No other historian can convey so vividly the feeling for how men breathe, eat, breed, enjoy themselves, go about their business, hope, worry and die. He is not too fastidious, he has a brotherly sympathy for the lusts of the flesh and the pride of the eye. All his books are written in what the French used to call the odour of the man... Vigorous, empathetic, sane, Professor Plumb is one of the tonic spirits of our day."

"Professor Plumb is outstanding among contemporary historians in fighting this diminished scope of his chosen discipline. It is shown, of course, in the breadth of his historical interests where his editorial work and his essays demonstrate his remarkable historical range. But it emerges more powerfully in the depth of his probing, and the constantly held wide perspective in which he has studied and made his own a portion of English history – the interrelation of political and social order in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... Again and again J. H. Plumb brings to our conciousness by inference the triumphant victory of humanity in the last centuries, despite all setbacks, over material squalor, disease and brutality of manners; equally insistent is his sense of the tragic shortness of men's lives set beside their aspirations, of their persistent proneness to cruelty, to lethargy or to corruption."

"In Robert Walpole's life he has found the exemplar of that need for political stability without which social stability is impossible; yet, as the concluding remarks upon political stability of his Ford Lectures show, he is intensely aware that this very banishment of the chaos which haunts us all, holds in itself the nemesis of an inertia upon which social instability feeds. To have maintained such profound and pressing human problems as the constant background of works of exceptional detailed scholarship has surely been Professor Plumb's own splendid answer to the urgent demand he posed in his penetrating lecture "The Death of the Past" of 1969, when he called for a renewal o a meaningful study of history in an age when the past no longer gives the old simple linear answers that helped to hold civilisation together from the age of Eusebius to the century of Karl Marx."

"The idea of the State is one which is little grasped in England."

"Collectivism...demands expert government..."the aristocracy of talent" of which Carlyle wrote. The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy."

"It has indeed been a feature common to the Evangelical and Catholic sections of the English Church—and, for that matter, a feature common to both with various Nonconformist societies, which in this respect have followed the same tradition and adopted similar methods—that they have all sought to make religion a general social force."

"All in all, we may say that Nonconformity served as a gathering ground of the various influences (religious, political, and economic) which produced the Liberal or Manchester philosophy of the nineteenth century—a philosophy which not only inspired a party, but determined in no small measure the general life and aspect of Victorian England. "Way for individual enterprise"—this was its teaching; and backed by the manufacturing and commercial classes, which had always been the stronghold of Nonconformity, its teaching triumphed. The reluctant Peel, a Conservative and a Churchman, bowed to its logic; the subtle mind of Gladstone, nurtured in the same tenets as Peel, came under its influence and became its chosen apostle. The England which presented itself to the Continent—the England which the Continent still sees (though it is passing or passed)—was the England of this tradition: not the England of Church and King, the "land" and loyalty, but the England of chapel and counting-house, the factory and self-help. The philosophy of England which travelled abroad was the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer; and both, whatever their religious views, were deeply imbued with the Nonconformist tradition. Spencer, as he writes in his autobiography, sprang from a family "essentially dissenting"; and his Nonconformist instincts and early training left an abiding mark, which appears in his opposition to any scheme of State education, and in the title and whole argument of The Man versus the State."

"I am bothered today by the abstract intellectualism of those with whom I used to associate, and by the conventional lip service to phrases in my old party—the Liberal Party. I admire more and more the practical wisdom of the good ordinary Englishman, facing the facts and "feeling" the right way through them—as a good Englishman feels his way through a new countryside... This means that I am getting nearer and nearer to you. It is a late change—at the age of 64. But I am glad that it is coming."

"Among Sir Ernest Barker's many interests and achievements...one was prolonged for some years after his retirement from most other activities, for he continued to work for better international understanding as a member of the United Kingdom National Commission for Unesco and as the first chairman of its National Co-operating Body for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. To both he brought a wealth of wisdom and experience and the stimulus of all those qualities of vitality, candour and stern intolerance of nonsense so well brought out in your memoir, all of which made him so truly worthy and justly eminent a citizen of that Republic of Letters to which his life's work was devoted."

"Yet, admirable though his books are, the fact remains that the man was bigger than his books. To think of Ernest Barker is to think, first and foremost, of one who, once met, can never be forgotten, a man of surprising candour, naive curiosity, and effortless vitality. He repelled a few, attracted many, aroused the interest of all. In many ways he was an extraordinarily intelligent child, and he influenced others with the unconscious fearlessness of a child. In all that he did he was always the same, a critical yet sensitive Liberal, not particularly careful of others, yet tender-hearted, easily stirred by the plight of those in adversity, happy in phrase as in disposition, often uncannily acute, and sometimes unexpectedly perverse."

"Whenever I see a row of poplars", the much-loved tutor Ernest Barker used to say in the rich Cheshire accent he guarded so stubbornly against the corrosive influences of both Oxford and Cambridge: "whenever I see a row of poplars going on in a straight line, over hill over dale, never turning aside for forest or river, I say to myself 'The Romans! The Romans have been here! It may be sentimental, but I like it.'"

"It would be difficult to name another scholar whose books and articles have been and are to-day as widely read by university teachers and students of political science in the United States. American scholars have especially admired his breadth of interests, ranging from an intimate acquaintance with classical Greek, which resulted in the most useful modern translation of Aristotle's Politics, to concern with major problems of the day, reflected in his letters to the Editor of The Times."

"[The milieu of the Persian court was one in which intellectual and artistic intercourse between representatives of the various satrapies flourished. The Persians themselves] “clearly … were not a people that we should call intellectual. They do not themselves seem to have had an inclination towards literature, medicine, or philosophical and scientific speculation.” Still, they provided a setting in which such speculation could be freely pursued... “what resulted from the ‘Pax Persica,’” says Cook, “was syncretism and cultural assimilation on a scale that had not previously been thinkable.”"

"From the Greek writers we get some idea of Persian education; but it applies only to the nobility, and there was no place for what we should call intellectual pursuits. From what we can gather, the sons of Persians of note were weaned from the ‘harem at the age of five (when for the first time they were allowed in the presence of the father) and until they were twenty or more they were brought up at the royal court (or in the provinces at the satraps’ court) Emphasis was laid on speaking the truth and learning the examples that the legends provided; older children might listen to the judgements of the royal justices. Herodotus says that among the Persians the thing most prized after valour in battle was to be the father of many children, we can understand that he aim was to contribute the maximum to Persian military strength, and the result must have been a population explosion at the higher social level."

"But the one remarkable achievement was the mixing of races that set the example for the cosmopolitan civilization of the near East after the conquest by Alexander. What resulted from the ‘Pax Persica’ was syncretism and cultural assimilation on a scale that had not previously been thinkable."

"As regards the qualities of the Persians we are in the main dependent on Greek sources. Clearly they were not a people that we should call intellectual. They do not themselves seem to have had an inclination towards literature, medicine, or philosophical and scientific speculation. They were probably most at ease when living as country gentlemen. Despite the uncompromising black and white of their religious creed as expressed by Darius, there is no trace of fanaticism in them, and in general they would seem to have been tolerant. They liked to live in pleasant surroundings; coming from a country in which cultivation is restricted to fertile patches of watered land they may have been rather narrowly ‘oasis-minded’. Luxury appealed to them."

"The situation of the Muslims of China was very different. They were geographically remote from the Muslim heartlands— in contrast to the Muslims of India, whose contacts were so close that to a large extent they transacted their affairs in Persian... The result was the appearance of a Muslim literature in Chinese that pressed the argument that Confucian and Muslim values were fully compatible, if not identical. Thus an inscription purportedly dating from 742, but likely to have been forged by Chinese Muslims in the Ming period, says of Confucius and Muḥammad that “their language differed, yet their principles agreed.”... Nor is Islamic-­Confucian syncretism likely to have cut much ice with the Chinese elite. One prominent Chinese Muslim author was able to persuade some Confucian scholars to write laudatory prefaces for his books, and the title of his heavily Confucianized work on Muslim ritual found a place in an imperial compendium of 1773–­1782. But the work was placed in the company of books that “contained little that was praiseworthy and much that was contemptible,” and an editorial comment, while conceding that the author’s literary style “is actually rather elegant,” maintained that “the clever literary ornamentation does him no good” for the simple reason that “Islam is fundamentally far-­fetched and absurd.”"

"With regard to the formal structure of the tradition, we need not beat about the bush. In obvious ways the Islamic heritage lends itself so easily to fundamentalization that it could almost be said to invite it."

"One is that, even before the rise of Islamism, there were indications that leftism did not in general fare as well in the Islamic world as it did in other Third World regions. There was a sense at the time that the presence of Islam displaced the political spectrum to the right. One effect of this was a certain opportunistic reticence on the part of leftists in the Islamic world when it came to the manifestation of antireligious sentiments."

"There are several reasons why Muslims make good enemies in the Indian context. One is that Muslims, whether they like it or not, are historically identified with the invaders who did most to destroy Hindu culture. Of course, not all the Muslim elite in India espoused this program assiduously, and many did not pursue it at all or indeed did the opposite. But there was enough rhetoric of destruction, and enough actual destruction, to lend support to a deep sense of Hindu grievance."

"But though India was never thoroughly subdued by the sword of Islam, and though the country only became partially Mahomedan, yet the whole framework of her institutions was shaken and dislocated by incessant resistance. The Mahomedans disorganized Hinduism without substituting any strong religious edifice of their own, as they managed to do elsewhere. The military adventurers, who founded dynasties in Northern India and carved out kingdoms in the Deklian, cared little for things spiritual; most of them had, indeed, no time for proselytism, being continually engaged in conquest or in civil war."

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."

"I learnt more during my school-days from my visits to the Cathedral at Winchester than I did from the hours of religious instruction in school. That great church with its tombs of the Saxon kings and the mediaeval statesmen-bishops gave one a greater sense of the magnitude of the religious element in our culture and the depths of its roots in our national life than anything one could learn from books."

"This distrust of the bourgeois is no modern phenomenon. It has its roots in a much older tradition than that of socialism. It is equally typical of the mediaeval noble and peasant, the romantic Bohemian and the modern Proletarian. The fact is that the bourgeoisie has always stood somewhat apart from the main structure of European society, save in Italy and in the Low Countries. While the temporal power was in the hands of the kings and the nobles and the spiritual power was in the hands of the Church, the bourgeois, the Third Estate, occupied a position of privileged inferiority which allowed them to amass wealth and to develop considerable intellectual culture and freedom of thought without acquiring direct responsibility or power. Consequently, when the French Revolution and the fall of the old regime made the bourgeoisie the ruling class in the West, it retained its inherited characteristics, its attitude of hostile criticism towards the traditional order and its enlightened selfishness in the pursuit of its interest. But although the bourgeois now possessed the substance of power he never really accepted social responsibility as the old rulers had done. He remained a private individual — an idiot in the Greek sense — with a strong sense of social conventions and personal rights, but with little sense of social solidarity and no recognition of his responsibility as the servant and representative of a super-personal order. In fact, he did not realize the necessity of such an order, since it had always been provided for him by others, and he had taken it for granted."

"The Bolshevik philosophy is simply the reductio ad absurdum of the principles implicit in bourgeois culture and consequently it provides no real answer to the weaknesses and deficiencies of the latter. It takes the nadir of the European spiritual development for the zenith of the new order."

"In reality the existing tendency toward social uniformity is far from solving the problem of social organization; it merely provides the material, the unorganized mass, which has to be informed by living spirits and ordered to some higher end. Without this, social uniformity can mean no more than a reversion to barbarism, and democracy nothing more than the rule of the herd."

"For the Liberal the spiritual center of gravity was in the individual, and the realm of private opinion and private interests was the ideal world. Hence, when the Liberal spoke of religion as a purely private matter it was in compliment rather than in derogation. To separate the Church from the State — to keep religion out of politics, was to elevate it to a higher sphere of spiritual values. But today in the democratic world, these values have been reversed. The individual life has lost its spiritual primacy, and it is social life which has now the higher prestige, so that to treat religion as a purely individual and personal matter is to deprive it of actuality and to degrade it to a lower level of value and potency. To keep religion out of public life is to shut it up in a stuffy Victorian back drawing room with the aspidistras and antimacassars, when the streets are full of life and youth. And the result is that the religion of the Church becomes increasingly alienated from real life while democratic society creates a new religion of the street and the forum to take its place."

"There is nothing [...] that can be said with greater certainty about these gods than the fact that they, indifferent to any happiness or pain in the world, live in the fullest bliss. Precisely this character brings us closest to the divinity of the Olympians. And precisely this spirit of celestial intangibility and silent bliss is what still breathes so happily and freely from the figures of the Greek gods today."

"In the song of the muses the truth of everything resonates as a being filled with the gods, which shines from the depths, revealing the eternal magnificence and blessed intangibility of the divine even in the darkest darkness and suffering greater. This is how the message of the divine reached the Greeks: not as a categorical request or as salvation in this and the other world, but rather as that which is eternal and blessed, which consoles and makes us happy not through promises , but since it is. The spirit of song announces to them the nature of the gods. In fact, singing is essentially their voice. By participating in singing, man can therefore participate in the divine, albeit in his own way, with humility. That which the song elevates into his sacred kingdom belongs to the eternal, that is to say: to that which is timeless and is connected to God."

"The gods then console even more when they come to meet man, they, who no pain touches. However, they do not console so much with what they give or promise, but rather with what they are. This is a miracle - and we can call it such - which we do not find only among the ancient Greeks , and yet among them it is among the fundamental characteristics of Hellenic religiosity and allows us to understand their entire spiritual attitude. For the high sensitivity of this type of man there is nothing more satisfying than the awareness that the eternally Blessed are, a knowledge that is already participation - human participation - in the bliss of the gods."

"The world of Charites however completely reveals its nature only when it is understood that "grace", which is here a divine figure, does not limit itself to signifying that which fascinates with gracefulness, that which spreads happiness, but also the joy and gratitude of being blessed with gift and happiness. As is easy to understand thanks to the well-known linguistic phrases, it is the wonderful kingdom in which giving and thanking are one, lovable giving and lovable taking, where right and justice, claim and reparation, have no access: the kingdom of full grace. A world in which subject and object are truly one, included in the divine splendor of a superior being."

"Apollo depicted in the Western pediment of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia The artist of the temple of Zeus at Olympia depicted his simultaneously powerful and spiritual superiority in the most grandiose and realistic way. In the midst of the wildest tumult, the god suddenly appears, and his outstretched arm imposes calm. It is impossible to bring to expression in a more compelling way the entrance of the divine with all its illuminating clarity and his omniscient gaze."

"But when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price. But there is also the feeling that all the ‘civilised world’ (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of ‘terrorism’ and its refusal to listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say."

"Rome was the only place in the ancient world where the state took responsibility for ensuring its citizens had enough to eat. [They knew] how you make a human community work."

"Roman society incorporated those who were mostly excluded in the ancient world, most obviously, women... They didn't have any formal political rights in Rome"

"Greek men didn't all look like this. And indeed, this guy, his musculature is actually physically impossible. What these are are images of a kind of perfect version of Greek masculinity."

"She's one of a series of wax models that were used in anatomy classes to demonstrate the internal structure of the body... And the instructor would come along and would remove, in a slightly sadistic way, the breasts and the chest, and the belly to reveal what was inside. And interestingly, there's a uterus with a foetus in - showing us very clearly what the 18th century thought women were for."

"I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate in the early 1970s and it was [a] white, posh, male enclave. Ten per cent of students were women and there was very little diversity of any sort. I left and the place has been transformed for the better. There weren’t any of those thick white rugger buggers that I used to teach in 1982."

"When I went to my first interview for an academic position, oddly enough in Thatcher's heyday. I bought myself a pair of blue stockings especially for the occasion. Although it was not my usual style, the logic seemed satisfactory: "If you, interviewers, are going to think that I am a real bluestocking, I will show you that I know what you are thinking and that I thought about it first."

"As for the deep cultural structures that legitimize the exclusion of women, it is very likely that these gradual changes will last too long, at least for me. We need to reflect on what power is, what it is for and how it is calibrated, or in other words, if we do not perceive that women are totally within power structures, then what we need to redefine is power, not women."

"It’s a "high-end" power in the traditional sense and linked to the image of the "glass ceiling", which not only places women out of power, but imagines pioneers as successful superwomen who only a few vestiges of male prejudice prevented them from reaching the top."

"It’s not easy to make women fit into a structure that is initially encoded as masculine: what needs to be done is to change the structure."

"Even more to the point, the root cause of the harassment that women have suffered (and the root cause of the earlier silence of so many) surely lies in the structures of power. If so, then the only effective remedy lies in a change to those structures. While fewer than ten percent of the directors of the top Hollywood films are women (that was the case in 2017), men will remain the gate-keepers of success in the film industry, and the effect of women's voices on its sexual culture – however loudly those voices have now been raised – is likely to be limited."

"Rome of antiquity is important. Ignoring the Romans would not be merely a blind eye to the long-ago past, for Rome helps us to this day to delineate our way of making sense of our world and ourselves, from sublime theory to vulgar comedies. After two thousand years, Rome is still the basis for the culture and politics, literatures and the sense of the world and its place in the world."

"The territorial boundaries of the Roman Empire have been established by the political geography of today's Europe and other regions. The main reason London is the capital of Great Britain is that the Romans made it the capital of their province of Britannia — a dangerous place on the other side of the vast ocean surrounding the civilized world. Rome has bequeathed us understandings of freedom and citizenship, as well as imperialist exploitation, along with today's political vocabulary from "senators" to "dictators." He has lent us his sayings - "fear the Greeks, even if they bring gifts" and "play the violin while Rome burns" and even "where there is life, there is hope". And he has evoked laughter, awe and fear to a more or less equal extent."

"This is a dangerous myth if we think we are better historians than our predecessors."

"Roman history is constantly being written around, it has always been done; In a sense, we know more about our ancient Romans than they themselves knew. In other words, Roman history is a work in progress."

"The rule of law is believed by most people to be “a good thing”—but that is only the case if the laws are just and fair laws and if they are followed honestly by legislators and implementers of the law, rather than being perverted by perverse motives."

"Some of the new religions have undoubtedly performed some bad things at some times and some places. But the same could be said about the established, “legitimate” religions. Why, one may ask, cannot the bad actions, whatever they be, be dealt with by legislature applicable to all religions and their members—indeed, all citizens—once it is alleged they have broken a law?"

"Eileen Barker’s extraordinary work in religious studies and the defense of religious liberty has left an indelible mark on academia and society. Her significant role in fostering understanding, promoting religious freedom, and advocating for global tolerance cannot be overstated. Eileen Barker’s impact on religious studies is evident in her pioneering research on new religious movements. Through meticulous ethnographic research and the development of innovative methodologies, she has shed light on previously misunderstood or stigmatized religious groups. Her work has challenged stereotypes, aiding in the recognition of diverse faith traditions and fostering greater understanding and empathy among scholars and the general public alike."

"Eileen Barker, Professor Emerita of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and arguably the world’s most senior scholar of new religious movements, explained to the audience [at the conference session New Religious Movements and Contemporary Threats to Religious Freedom] that there is a difference between the role of a sociologist of religion and the role of an advocate. To stress that you look at a religion with the neutral gaze of the social scientist is “the best way you can be an advocate,” Barker said. This does not mean, she added, that sociologists cannot have strong feelings for religious liberty, and they can help protecting it by debunking misinformation about religious minorities."

"I think that it is wrong that Archaeology should be located within Anthropology because archaeologists have equally strong links to History and the natural sciences."

"One of the things I thought was very important during the 1980s was the idea that culture is meaningfully constituted. I still think that is right. But now, I put the emphasis on the "meaningful constitution"rather than the "cultural"bit. I have had arguments with my colleagues in Stanford about this. I take the view that culture is not a helpful term. It tends to be reifying and dangerous. I prefer to break it down and talk about the various processes that constitute it."

"...In the contemporary world, it is worrying trying to create cultural groups, because it is always motivated from an interest-position. Trying to define cultures in the past is always, as we know, part of a motivated attempt to find one's nostalgic origins or to create a sense of continuity."

"Beneath the pseudo-scientific terminology one can in each case recognize a phantasy of which almost every element is to be found in phantasies which were already current in medieval Europe. The final, decisive battle of the Elect (be they the ‘Aryan race’ or the ‘proletariat’) against the hosts of evil (be they the Jews or the ‘bourgeoisie’); a dispensation on which the Elect are to be most amply compensated for all their sufferings by the joys of total domination or of total community or of both together; a world purified of all evil and in which history is to find its consummation - these ancient imaginings are with us still."

"[I]t is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

"This book began as an enquiry into the origins of the great European witch-hunt. It ended as something wider. It argues that the stereotype of the witch, as it existed in many parts of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is made up of elements of diverse origins, and that some of these derived from a specific fantasy which can be traced back to Antiquity."

"A stranger to the spirit of the law as it was evolved through centuries in England will always find its history a curious one. Looking first at the early English Common Law, its most striking feature is the enormous extent to which its founders concerned themselves with remedies before settling the substantive rules for breach of which the remedies were required. Nowhere else, unless perhaps in the law of ancient Rome, do we see such a spectacle of legal writs making legal rights."

"The moral of the whole story is the hopelessness of attempting to study Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence apart from the history of its growth and of the characters of the judges who created it. It is by no accident that among Anglo-Saxon lawyers the law does not assume the form of codes, but is largely judge-made. We have statutory codes for portions of the field which we have to cover. But those statutory codes come, not at the beginning, but at the end. For the most part the law has already been made by those who practise it before the codes embody it. Such codes with us arrive only with the close of the day, after its heat and burden have been borne, and when the journey is already near its end."

"Conscience and, for that matter, law overlap parts of the sphere of social obligation about which I am speaking. A rule of conduct may, indeed, appear in more than one sphere, and may consequently have a twofold sanction. But the guide to which the citizen mostly looks is just the standard recognised by the community, a community made up mainly of those fellow-citizens whose good opinion he respects and desires to have. He has everywhere round him an object-lesson in the conduct of decent people towards each other and towards the community to which they belong. Without such conduct and the restraints which it imposes there could be no tolerable social life, and real freedom from interference would not be enjoyed. It is the instinctive sense of what to do and what not to do in daily life and behaviour that is the source of liberty and ease. And it is this instinctive sense of obligation that is the chief foundation of society. Its reality takes objective shape and displays itself in family life and in our other civic and social institutions"

"Indeed the civic community is more than a political fabric. It includes all the social institutions in and by which the individual life is influenced—such as are the family, the school, the church, the legislature, and the executive. None of these can subsist in isolation from the rest; together they and other institutions of the kind form a single organic whole, the whole which is known as the Nation."

"There are few observers who have not been impressed with the wonderful unity and concentration of purpose which an entire nation may display—above all, in a period of crisis. We see it in time of war, when a nation is fighting for its life or for a great cause. We have seen it in Japan, and we have seen it still more recently even among the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. We have marvelled at the illustrations with which history abounds of the General Will rising to heights of which but few of the individual citizens in whom it is embodied have ever before been conscious even in their dreams."

"There is growing up a disposition to believe that it is good, not only for all men but for all nations, to consider their neighbours' point of view as well as their own. There is apparent at least a tendency to seek for a higher standard of ideals in international relations. The barbarism which once looked to conquest and the waging of successful war as the main object of statesmanship, seems as though it were passing away. There have been established rules of International Law which already govern the conduct of war itself, and are generally observed as binding by all civilised people, with the result that the cruelties of war have been lessened. If practice falls short of theory, at least there is to-day little effective challenge of the broad principle that a nation has as regards its neighbours duties as well as rights."

"In the year which is approaching, a century will have passed since the United States and the people of Canada and Great Britain terminated a great war by the Peace of Ghent. On both sides the combatants felt that war to be unnatural and one that should never have commenced. And now we have lived for nearly a hundred years, not only in peace, but also, I think, in process of coming to a deepening and yet more complete understanding of each other, and to the possession of common ends and ideals, ends and ideals which are natural to the Anglo-Saxon group, and to that group alone. It seems to me that within our community there is growing an ethical feeling which has something approaching to the binding quality of which I have been speaking"

"In the welter of sentimentality, amid which Great Britain might easily have mouldered into ruin, my valued colleague, Lord Haldane, presented a figure alike interesting, individual, and arresting. In speech fluent and even infinite he yielded to no living idealist in the easy coinage of sentimental phraseology. Here, indeed, he was a match for those who distributed the chloroform of Berlin. Do we not remember, for instance, that Germany was his spiritual home? But he none the less prepared himself, and the Empire, to talk when the time came with his spiritual friends in language not in the least spiritual. He devised the Territorial Army, which was capable of becoming the easy nucleus of national conscription, and which unquestionably ought to have been used for that purpose at the outbreak of war. He created the Imperial General Staff. He founded the Officers' Training Corps."

"Mr. Asquith had decided that the time had come when his Ministry ought to be reconstituted on a national instead of a party basis. He had invited the Conservative leaders to enter into a coalition, and they had agreed, but on conditions. One condition was that Haldane should not be included. A discreditable newspaper campaign had attacked him as pro-German, although in fact no man in the whole country had more clearly realised the danger of a German aggression, and no man had done more than he, as Secretary of State at the War Office, to initiate great reforms in the organisation, expansion, and equipment of the army to prepare it for such an eventuality. Haldane had been for many years an intimate friend of Asquith's and was his closest political associate. Now he had to choose—for the condition was insisted upon—between inflicting upon him what he knew to be a cruel injustice, or else failing in his duty to construct a combined Government to carry on the war."

"The model of a modern Prime Minister would be a kind of grotesque composite freak—someone with the dedication to duty of a Peel, the physical energy of a Gladstone, the detachment of a Salisbury, the brains of an Asquith, the balls of a Lloyd George, the word-power of a Churchill, the administrative gifts of an Attlee, the style of a Macmillan, the managerialism of a Heath, and the sleep requirements of a Thatcher. Human beings do not come like that."

"Ghetto-makars, tae the knackirs' Wi aw yir schemes, yir smug dour dreams O yir ain feet. Yi're beat By yon new Scoatlan loupin tae yir street..."

"Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheel-barrows and move them north To celebrate my mother's sewing-machine And her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling Iambs on an antique metal footplate."

"Semiconductor country, land crammed with intimate expanses, Your cities are superlattices, heterojunctive Graphed from the air, your cropmarked farmlands Are epitaxies of tweed."

"Among circuitboard crowsteps To be miniaturised is not small-minded. To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells — Your harbours, your photography, your democratic intellect Still boundless, chip of a nation."

"Thinking of Helensburgh, J. G. Frazer Revises flayings and human sacrifice; Abo of the Celtic Twilight, St Andrew Lang Posts him a ten-page note on totemism And a coloured fairy book."

"James Murray combs the dialect from his beard And files slips for his massive Dictionary."

"... Listen — Not to dour centuries of trudging, Marching, and taking orders; Today I have heard the feet of my country Breaking into a run."

"In most education policy research money is rarely mentioned and is overwritten by a focus on ideas and practices. Even when subjected to the arcane mercies of the economics of education, issues of funding are dealt with as abstractions. However, in the interface between education policy and neoliberalism money is everywhere."

"Policy itself is now bought and sold, it is a commodity and a profit opportunity, and there is a growing global market in policy ideas. Policy work is also increasingly being out-sourced to profit-making organisations, which bring their skills, discourses and sensibilities to the policy table, for an hourly rate or on contract to the state."

"Money is also important in getting neoliberalism, as a doctrine and as a set of policy ideas, into the public and political imagination. That is, funding for advocacy, ‘research’ and ‘influence’ activities in making neoliberalism thinkable, possible, obvious and necessary."

"Capital, through philanthropic foundations, invests in the work of think tanks and advocacy networks and policy entrepreneurs with the intention and hope of exacting extensions to the commodification of the social, the creation of new markets and the deregulation of existing ones."

"Greek and Roman religion depended on images, quite literally: there were no sacred laws or scripture and certainly no organised church or priesthood to police practice and correct error. It was in their images and their names that the gods persisted for at least two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors."

"These dates Mueller later insisted were minimum dates only, and latterly there has been a sort of tacit agreement... to date the composition of the Rigveda somewhere about 1400-1500 BC, but without any absolutely conclusive evidence."

"S. Piggott established the presence of a sophisticated type of vehicle with “one or two pairs of wheels with their axles... from the Rhine to the Indus by around 3000” (1992: 18)."

"In sum, however, the evidence from Baluchistan and from Sind and the Punjab is reasonably consistent in implying that at some period likely to have been before 1500 BCE (to use a convenient round figure), the long-established cultural traditions of North-Western India were rudely and ruthlessly interrupted by the arrival of a new people from the west. The burning of Baluchi villages and the equipment of the graves at Sahi Tump suggest that these new arrivals were predominantly conquerors who traveled light and adopted the pottery of the region in which they established themselves. In Sind, at Chanhudaro, a barbarian settlement appears [evidently the reference is to the Jhukar Culture] in the deserted ruins of the Harappan town, and here some local craftsmen may have remained to work for their alien masters, while the pottery suggests a resurgence of local, non-Harappan elements. At Mohenjo-daro, it seems clear that the civilization that had survived so long was already effete and on the wane when the raiders came, and at Harappa we know from the evidence of the rebuilding of the Citadel walls that the inhabitants were on the defensive in the last days of the city, though, these precautionary measures did not suffice to keep away the intruders, wherever they came from, who afterwards settled on the ruins and buried their dead in Cemetery H for generations."

"The method has its dangers—the great Sanskrit scholar A. B. Keith once remarked that by taking the linguistic evidence too literally, one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet, but not rain and hands!"

"I grew up in London... My parents had been politically active in different ways, so I was influenced a lot by them. I grew up as a kid going on demonstrations in my pushchair, from anti-apartheid to “ban the bomb.” My mum was very involved, and my dad had been in the Communist Party. I suppose I came of age on the end of Black Power, and when I was doing my A levels, Black Power was in the air. I read Black Power literature and thought about all those sorts of issues. Obviously, 1968 was significant. Enoch Powell made his speech, and I was 12 years old then, so I was beginning to go out and the skinheads were around. At times, you had to run for your life or they would attack you in the street."

"Today, people don’t talk about black people eating Kit-e-Kat."

"Appropriation is the fundamental law of culture. I don’t feel threatened by the idea that people think I’m wrong or that they think they can do better. Let’s see if they can!"

"We have to offer people a different way of looking at things that isn’t just a critique. The critique is fine as far as it goes, but people need help. They need a hand and we have to be imaginative enough to be able to speak to that need."

"Most people are having their racial and ethnic differences given back to them by their national or ethnic leaders as a way of controlling them and channelling their hopes - their dreams and their aspirations - towards goals that are defined by an indifferent and self-serving oligarchy. People are anxious. They feel that they need something else apart from these sham certainties. That’s certainly what I hope."

"The first consideration on reaching Egypt was where to be housed. In those days there was no luxurious close to the ; if any one needed to live there, they must either live in a tomb or in the Arab village. As an English engineer had left a tomb fitted with door and shutters I was glad to get such accommodation. When I say a tomb, it must be understood to be the upper chamber where the Egyptian fed his ancestors with offerings, not the actual sepulchre. And I had three rooms, which had belonged to separate tombs originally ; the thin walls of rock which the economical Egyptian left between his cuttings, had been broken away, and so I had a doorway in the middle into my living-room, a window on one side for my bedroom, and another window opposite for a store-room. I resided here for a great part of two years; and often when in draughty houses, or chilly tents, I have wished myself back in my tomb. No place is so equable in heat and cold, as a room cut out in solid rock ; it seems as good as a fire in cold weather, and deliciously cool in the heat."

"In 1893-1894 I went to to search for remains of the dynastic race, which presumably had entered Egypt at that point from the Red Sea. In the lowest part of the temple foundations we found parts of three colossal figures of the local god , each with surface carvings of animals, &c. They obviously belonged to a far earlier art than anything known in Egypt, and all later discoveries confirm their being placed as the earliest works of the , long before the establishment of the . One figure is at Cairo, and two are in the Asmolean Museum at Oxford."

"In few kinds of work are the results so directly dependent on the personality of the worker as they are in excavating. The old saying that a man finds what he looks for in a subject, is too true; or if he has not enough insight to ensure finding what he looks for, it is at least sadly true that he does not find anything that he does not look for. Whether it be , , , or that excavators have been seeking, they have seldom preserved or cared for anything but their own limited object. Of late years the notion of digging merely for profitable spoil, or to yield a new excitement to the jaded, has spread unpleasantly—at least in Egypt. A concession to dig is sought much like a grant of a monastery at the : the man who has influence or push, a title or a trade connection, claims to try his luck at the spoils of the land. Gold digging has at least no moral responsibility, beyond the ruin of the speculator; but spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it, which those who do it may be charitably supposed to be too ignorant or unintelligent to see or realise."

"To the Egyptian the gods might be mortal; even , the sun-god, is said to have grown old and feeble, was slain, and , the great hunter of the heavens, killed and ate the gods. The mortality of gods has been dwelt on by ('), and the many instances of tombs of gods, and of the slaying of the deified man who was worshipped, all show that immortality was not a divine attribute. Nor was there any doubt that they might suffer while alive; one myth tells how Ra, as he walked on earth, was bitten by a magic serpent and suffered torments. The gods were also supposed to share in a life like that of man, not only in Egypt but in most ancient lands. Offerings of food and drink were constantly supplied to them, in Egypt laid upon the altars, in other lands burnt for a sweet savour."

"From the ' diggers, I secured a lot of seventy-five Attic s in perfect condition, which served to show the accuracy of the mint in Athens, for most of the coins would have passed our own mint standard."

"He found archaeology in Egypt a treasure hunt; he left it a science."

"Flinders Petrie had no school or university training. His mother was the only child of , a naval officer who served under Bligh of ', and later explored and surveyed much of the coast of Australia. This lady taught her son the rudiments of knowledge and imbued him at an early age with the love of collecting and studying Greek and Roman coins."

"In 1880 … Petrie set out on an expedition to Egypt long contemplated and prepared for, but delayed in the fruitless hope that his father might accompany him. So the survey of the pyramids, begun with an open mind but in the end intended to settle once for all controversy about prophetic feet and inches, was undertaken almost single-handed, the only helper being an old Egyptian who, as a child, had served , and later and . When Petrie, after two winters in Egypt and a year’s work on the plans, submitted his account to the in 1883 Francis Galton reported so favourably on it that £100 was granted for publication. Galton continued his encouragement in subsequent years, and , who, with and others, had just founded the , insisted that this new body should give the young man an opportunity to excavate. Thus his excavations commenced when he was thirty; they continued, with very rare exceptions, every year for over fifty years."

"I had an excellent conventional grammar school education, where I had a wonderful history teacher. That was very important; it instilled in me from an early age how important teaching was and what a difference it can make."

"It was an incredible learning curve, realising how historians tend to only see what they’re interested in."

"For me, the point of doing history has been about how understanding the past might help us to improve people’s lives in the present. You can see that so clearly in relation to women’s rights or in relation to racial inequality."

"...The national narrative in Britain has been one of liberty, freedom, a freedom loving people, prosperity, peace, no conquests, no violence, no expropriation. A peaceful story from beginning to end. A transformation from barbarism to civilisation, but one that has been done in an extraordinary and English way. Which means recognising trouble when it’s coming and dealing with it before it happens, reforming in time, and therefore the slow march of progress. And that Whig story of English history is still phenomenally powerful."

"I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us."

"The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference."

"Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning — if you have enough of them."

"The system-builders, from Hegel to Toynbee, selected facts from history to prove an a priori thesis, and presented subjective works of art as objective statements of fact. But the old positivist belief in the possibility of a truly scientific and objective history is no longer held even by the most fanatical members of the Institute of Historical Research."

"The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, selecting evidence to conform to his views and ignoring all that does not. The abuse of history in fact lies less often in the motives of the historian than in his methods. It was after all the most honourable loyalties and affections which led Cardinal Gasquet to attempt the vindication of the monastic orders against the charges of Protestant historians; the formidable Coulton may have been inspired merely by acrimonious anti-Popish spite; but Coulton was an honest scholar, and Gasquet, one is forced to conclude, was not."

""Covenants without swords are but words." Thus did Hobbes sum up, typically, one of the more elementary and depressing truths of political science. At the root of save all the most primitive or the most celestial of social organizations there must lie the sanction of force: force not to create right but to uphold it; force to assure order, to cow rebellion at home and to subdue enemies abroad. That it is not in itself the foundation of society, that it is only the one factor out of many which go to constitute a political community, has been emphasized by political thinkers at least since the days of St Augustine. But as yet no community of any degree of complexity has succeeded in existing without force, and the manner in which that force is organized and controlled will largely determine the political structure of the State."

"The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment. The social and economic developments of the past fifty years had brought about a military as well an industrial revolution. The Prussians had kept abreast of it and France had not. Therein lay the basic cause of her defeat."

"Hobbes's ideas seemed at least as relevant to the middle decades of the twentieth century as they had been to those of the seventeenth. (Happy the generation now growing up in our universities whose natural affinity appears to be rather with Rousseau!) A situation in which recourse to force is such an imminent probability that one's whole life and policy has to be adjusted to it is not, save in the most formal sense, a state of peace. It is for that reason that I equate peace with that unfashionable term 'Order'; an emphasis which probably brands me as a temperamental Tory rather than a temperamental Whig."

"So long as the conventional balance remains so uneven, the Western strategy of relying on the first use of nuclear weapons to defend ourselves is not only morally dubious but politically incredible. But the responsibility for this strategy does not lie with the United States. It lies with the governments and peoples of Western Europe who have, for the last thirty years, refused to take the necessary measures to provide for their own conventional defence. That is where the CND is so dangerous. Their present campaign is sending a signal both to Moscow and to the United States, not simply that the peoples of Western Europe are not prepared to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, but that they are not prepared to defend themselves at all: a signal that could create a quite terrifying degree of instability by presenting the leaders of the Soviet Union with options that hitherto have been firmly closed to them."

"Many Christians, of whom I am one, see no moral dilemma inherent in the possession, and if necessary the use, of nuclear weapons to deter their use against our own peoples by a Soviet state whose leaders are explicitly unconstrained by those considerations of "bourgeois morality" which so properly worry us. It is the initiation of the use of these weapons that causes so many of us such profound concern; and we have come to depend on that initiation because we have acquiesced in a decision to maintain a standard of living far higher than that of our adversaries, rather than provide the resources needed for a convincing defence by non-nuclear means of the territories of Western Europe."

"The Foreign Secretary's Malcolm Rifkind] apologia for Nato enlargement is strong on dogmatic assertion but weak on reasoned argument... "Neither the new Nato nor its expansion poses a threat to Russia". That surely is for the Russians to say. After all, we were taught during the Cold War to base our policies on the capabilities of our adversaries rather than their intentions. To take account of Russian susceptibilities is not to accept their veto over our policies. It is simply to recognise that there can never be stability in Europe unless the Russians feel secure, and to ride roughshod over their susceptibilities is not a very sensible way to guarantee the security of their neighbours to the west."

"Michael Howard is an excellent and succinct writer and his book is very easy to read."

"An elegance of style which, since his much esteemed early work The Franco-Prussian War, has always distinguished his writing has not been achieved by a sacrifice of accuracy or relentless extension of his "wide learning", and his critical judgments – sometimes feline, sometimes ruthless – are usually cogent. More than that. I suppose that during recent decades nobody on either side of the Atlantic has so effectively brought military studies securely within the domain of the humane disciplines. If he has not civilized Bellona single-handed, he is primus inter pares."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform."

"Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it."

"Carey is extremely well read, and uses his impressive knowledge to point out some of the sillinesses of writers, such as in their attacks on "tinned food" and cremation as possible causes for the decline of British civilization. He is a healthy questioner of received opinions. It forces one to rethink one's preconceptions."

"You crawl on your stomach for hours … climbing up yawning abysses (lighted only by an acetylene lamp …) and get knocked on the head by stalactites and on the legs by stalagmites, and in the end arrive at all sorts of wonders; bison modelled in clay, and portraits of sorcerers, and footprints of Magdalenian man."

"Mud, muck, ooze upon the floor, torn tents and thunder – all were forgotten as the sherry bottle was opened"

"j’aime mieux écrire que discuter de vive voix [I much prefer to write than discuss aloud]"

"Europe was only after all a peninsula of Africa and Asia"

"Civilization in its higher form today, though highly complex, forms essentially a unitary mass. It has no longer to be sought out in separate luminous centers, shining like planets through the surrounding night. Still less is it the property of one privileged country or people. Many as are the tongues of mortal man, its votaries, like the Immortals, speak a single language. Throughout the whole vast area illumined by its quickening rays its workers are interdependent and pledged to a common cause."

"Of importance for the is that , in both his cycle books, had concentrated his energies on the statistical evidence of the economic interactions involved in the business cycle and the of these relationships rather than on the relation between the economic cycle and the exogenous causal factor. Moore's concern with evidence end statistical explanation compared to that of Jevons, and the matching change in contemporaries' responses, are both indicative of the development of the econometric approach by the early years of the twentieth century. Yet, it was some years before Moore's broad econometric approach to the explanation of economic cycles, involving a large number relationships linking different parts of the economy, was taken up by who produced the first macro econometric models in the late 1930s."

"From the late nineteenth century, economics gradually became a more technocratic, tool-based, science, using mathematics and statistics embedded in various kinds of analytical techniques. ... By the late twentieth century, economics had become heavily dependent on a set of reasoning tools that economists now call 's': small mathematical, statistical, graphical, diagrammatic, and even physical objects that can be manipulated in various different ways. Today, in the twenty-first century, if we go to an economics seminar, or read a learned scientific paper in that field, we find that economists write down some equations or maybe draw a diagram, and use those to develop solutions to their theoretical conundrums or to answer questions about the economic world."

"The joint work with from that research group, ' ..., is now seen as creating a new strand. The extant philosophy of science thought about s in relation to theory: models were ways of capturing the essence of a theory. What we were doing in that little research group – and what we did in the volume Models as Mediators – was to say, if you look at the way science is practised, you see that scientists treat models as autonomous objects on which they develop arguments. They manipulate them, argue with them, extend them. Models are not in a simple relationship between theory and the world, rather they are at angles to both, so you can use them to interrogate both sides. Models as Mediators is 20 years old, and you can definitely see now that the project as a whole changed the conversation in the philosophy of science about models. I don’t mean that everybody was convinced by it, but it created a big enough presence so that, even if you didn’t agree with it, you had to take it into account. This work was part of a wider move that has been happening toward ‘the philosophy of science in practice’."

"It is clear that for Herbert Hunger, Byzantium was not an exotic phenomenon in the historical and political self-awareness of Austria in the twentieth century, but a legacy and consequently a claim whose pointed cultivation should certainly benefit the country's image. This – one might say – national goal, which we today would rather describe as a European goal, has, as we all know, been realized."

"What the Roman Empire is to European history, the Mongol Empire is to Asian history."

"What seems to destroy world orders (at least in history) is not great power rivalry, but structural pressures that fray connective tissues."

"If you were living in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century, you would not think Europe was the center of the world, you would think “Asia” (whatever you called it) was the center of the world"

"Even more so than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there are major structural trends that are threatening to change the way we experience politics: climate change, developments in technology such as AI or shifts in how we do finance such as bitcoin and other similar technologies."

"In the 1840s rival British and French teams began to uncover and document the remains of vast stone palaces near Mosul, now in northern Iraq but then part of the Ottoman Empire whose capital was Istanbul. The adventurers quickly identified the ruins they were digging as the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, known to them through the stories of the Old Testament and Classical authors. Thus they claimed it as part of their own, European heritage, and were little interested in its place in Middle Eastern history and tradition per se. Thus unwittingly the tone was set for interpreting ancient Assyrian – and, later, Babylonian and Sumerian – remains. […] The finds represented the ‘cradle of civilization,’ mankind’s first tottering steps toward European sophistication. [And] they were potential witnesses to events described in the Old Testament, appearing at a crucial juncture in Western European intellectual history […]. (Robson 2007: 59)."

"For many people, the attraction of Plimpton 322 has been exactly its status as a ‘first infantile step’ on the way to modern Western-style mathematics. (Robson 2001)."

"True, the discovery is also claimed for India. The work relied on is the Apastamba-Sulba-Sutra, the date of which is put at least as early as the fifth or fourth century B.C., while it is remarked that the matter of it must have been much older than the book itself ... There is a proposition stating the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 as a fact in general terms, but without proof […] Certain considerations suggest doubts as to whether the proposition had been established by any proof applicable to all cases. Thus Apastamba mentions only seven rational right angle triangles; he had no general rule such as that attributed to Pythagoras for forming any number of rational right-angle triangles; [his words imply] that he knew no other such triangles. […] the theorem is enunciated and used as if it were of general application; there is, however, no sign of any general proof; there is nothing in fact to show that the assumption of its universal truth was founded on anything better than an imperfect induction from a certain number of cases, discovered empirically, of triangles with sides in the ratios of whole numbers in which the property (1) that the square on the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two was found to be always accompanied by the property (2) that the latter two sides include a right angle."

"Though this is the proposition universally associated by tradition with the name of Pythagoras, no really trustworthy evidence exists that it was actually discovered by him."

"All our Greek texts of the Elements up to a century ago…purport in their titles to be either ‘from the edition of Theon’…or ‘from the lectures of Theon... [Greek commentaries] commonly speak of the writer of the Elements instead of using his name."

"It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our master."

"I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel–Coleridge type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us, wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike 'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared only by Goethe's Faust. It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring."

"I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post. The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear, Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley."

"The Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom."

"Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end in itself since the middle class would always had ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won. The bureaucracy and officer corps had to be eliminated. What was needed, in fact, was not just an uprising as demanded by the Bolsheviks but a commitment to a struggle to 'make the revolution permanent'."

"The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of 'European revolution' but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them."

"There is a tiny pause, right at the start of the film that caught at my heart, but I didn't think anyone else would notice it. It took me back to the work I did on my biography of Virginia Woolf. There were two documents in her archives that I found particularly distressing. One was the little soft-covered notebook she used for her diary for 1941. I knew there wouldn't be any entries after , but I couldn't help turning the blank pages that followed, unable to believe that the voice I had been living with for the past five years had stopped speaking. The other was her suicide note. (One of the suicide notes, in fact. She wrote three — two versions for her husband, , and one for her sister — unable to stop revising her work until the end.)"

"Of the many metaphors for biography, two make useful starting points. One — a disturbing image — is the autopsy, the forensic examination of the dead body which takes place when the is unusual, suspicious, or ambiguous. ... There is something gruesome about this metaphor. It is used when commentators on biography want to emphasize its ghoulish or predatory aspects. ... A contrasting metaphor for biography is the portrait. Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation, portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character. The portraitist simulates warmth, energy, idiosyncrasy, and personality through attention to detail and skill in representation."

"When I was very young, I think I was aware that I was reading different kinds of books, which slightly took my teachers aback. I can remember boastfully telling my teacher, when I was about 10, that I was reading '. She clearly thought this was a bad idea. But I was a slightly odd, inward child. At home – we didn’t have television – I was reading, reading all the time."

"Emotions about our lost houses and gardens have to do with growing old and acquiring guilt: we are always leaving our first home and lamentingly looking back to it. The whole point of the Garden of Eden is that we are going to leave it, and then spend the rest of our time wishing we could return to it."

"Talking with a younger generation of readers, I see how Shelley has become increasingly a European figure, a Dante among English poets, and an image of Faustian daring, whose writing and travels still inspire that primary spirit of adventure into a wider world of ideal possibilities. Nothing is so moving to the as finding an old copy of his book in a stranger's hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its poetry underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its cover bleached with sun and sea."

"The had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its ' was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of s and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public. This became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the ‘experimental method' became the basis of a new, secular , in which the infinite (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake."

"At eighteen, just out of and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ', as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the , following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a , sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The is like a French version of the , wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle toile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a for fifty s in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began."

"It is a brilliant vignette, prompting a meditation on the role of memory in biographical writing, and an exploration of the things that get forgotten in the writing of lives. Throughout This Long Pursuit, Holmes moves between reflections on the subjects of his career as a and sketches of himself at work. We see him lecturing on Coleridge at the , scribbling at a table in the , scurrying from the with a glossy catalogue under his arm and newly discovered stories brimming in his mind. The result is a glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, and ’."

"Holmes is not offering a history of either or its technologies. The and are barely mentioned (perhaps because they feature in The Age of Wonder). What we have instead is a "cluster of balloon stories" drawn from life and fiction, and more from life than from fiction. Some of the footnotes are anecdotal, but the book itself is more than that; Holmes is a distinguished with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around them."

"Since the normal tendency is to simplify, to trivialize, to eliminate the unfamiliar word or construction, the rule is praestat difficilior lectio...When we choose the 'more difficult' reading, however, we must be sure that it is in itself a plausible reading. The principle should not be used in support of dubious syntax, or phrasing that it would not have been natural for the author to use. There is an important difference between a more difficult reading and a more unlikely reading."