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3495 quotes found

"Broadchalke is one of the most pleasing villages in England. Old Herbert Bundy, the defendant, was a farmer there. His home was at Yew Tree Farm. It went back for 300 years. His family had been there for generations. It was his only asset. But he did a very foolish thing. He mortgaged it to the bank. Up to the very hilt. Not to borrow money for himself, but for the sake of his son. Now the bank have come down on him. They have foreclosed. They want to get him out of Yew Tree Farm and to sell it. They have brought this action against him for possession. Going out means ruin for him. He was granted legal aid. His lawyers put in a defence. They said that, when he executed the charge to the bank he did not know what he was doing: or at any rate that the circumstances were such that he ought not to be bound by it. At the trial his plight was plain. The judge was sorry for him. He said he was a "poor old gentleman." He was so obviously incapacitated that the judge admitted his proof in evidence. He had a heart attack in the witness-box. Yet the judge felt he could do nothing for him. There is nothing, he said, "which takes this out of the vast range of commercial transactions." He ordered Herbert Bundy to give up possession of Yew Tree Farm to the bank. Now there is an appeal to this court. The ground is that the circumstances were so exceptional that Herbert Bundy should not be held bound."

- Alfred Denning, Baron Denning

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"To some this may appear to be a small matter, but to Mr. Harry Hook, it is very important. He is a street trader in the Barnsley Market. He has been trading there for some six years without any complaint being made against him; but, nevertheless, he has now been banned from trading in the market for life. All because of a trifling incident. On Wednesday, October 16, 1974, the market was closed at 5:30. So were all the lavatories, or 'toilets' as they are now called. They were locked up. Three quarters of an hour later, at 6:20, Harry Hook had an urgent call of nature. He wanted to relieve himself. He went into a side street near the market and there made water, or 'urinated' as it is now said. No one was about except one or two employees of the council, who were cleaning up. They rebuked him. He said: 'I can do it here if I like'. They reported him to a security officer who came up. The security officer reprimanded Harry Hook. We are not told the words used by the security officer. I expect they were in language which street traders understand. Harry Hook made an appropriate reply. Again, we are not told the actual words, but it is not difficult to guess. I expect it was an emphatic version of 'You be off'. At any rate, the security officer described them as words of abuse. Touchstone would say that the security officer gave the 'reproof valiant' and Harry Hook gave the 'counter-check quarrelsome'; As You Like It, Act V, Scene IV. On Thursday morning the security officer reported the incident. The market manager thought it was a serious matter. So he saw Mr. Hook the next day, Friday, October 18. Mr. Hook admitted it and said he was sorry for what had happened. The market manager was not satisfied to leave it there. He reported the incident to the chairman of the amenity services committee of the Council. He says that the chairman agreed that 'staff should be protected from such abuse'. That very day the market manager wrote a letter to Mr. Hook, banning him from trading in the market."

- Alfred Denning, Baron Denning

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"In summertime village cricket is a delight to everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in the County of Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good clubhouse for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team plays there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings they practice while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play anymore. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket, but now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket field. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at weekends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground."

- Alfred Denning, Baron Denning

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"Mr. Selden was a person whom no character can part flatter, or transmit in any expressions equal to his merit and virtue. He was of so stupendous learning in all kinds and in all languages, (as may appear in his excellent and transcendent writings,) that a man would have thought he had been entirely conversant amongst books, and had never spent an hour but in reading and writing; yet his humanity, courtesy, and affability was such, that he would have been thought to have been bred in the best courts, but that his good nature, charity, and delight in doing good, and in communicating all he knew, exceeded that breeding. His style in all his writings seems harsh and sometimes obscure; which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstruse subjects of which he commonly treated, out of the paths trod by other men; but to a little undervaluing the beauty of a style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity: but in his conversation he was the most dear discourser, and had the best faculty of making hard things easy, and presenting them to the understanding, of any man that hath been known. Mr. Hyde was wont to say, that he valued himself upon nothing more than upon having had Mr. Selden's acquaintance from the time he was very young; and held it with great delight as long as they were suffered to continue together in London; and he was very much troubled always when he heard him blamed, censured, and reproached, for staying in London, and in the parliament, after they were in rebellion, and in the worst times, which his age obliged him to do; and how wicked soever the actions were which were every day done, he was confident he had not given his consent to them; but would have hindered them if he could with his own safety, to which he was always enough indulgent. If he had some infirmities with other men, they were weighed down with wonderful and prodigious abilities and excellencies in the other scale."

- John Selden

0 likesJuristsNon-fiction authors from EnglandOrientalistsUniversity of Oxford alumniUniversity of Cambridge faculty
"It is my opinion, that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of Government and legislation whatsoever. The colonists are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen...The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England. Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power...When, therefore, in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax, what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty,—what? Our own property?—No! We give and grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty's Commons of America...The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty...There is an idea in some, that the colonies are virtually represented in this House...Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?...Or will you tell him that he is represented by any representative of a borough?—a borough which perhaps its own representatives never saw.—This is what is called the rotten part of the constitution. It cannot continue a century. If it does not drop, it must be amputated...I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest...The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know when were they made slaves?"

- William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

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"When then, my Lords, are all the generous efforts of our ancestors, are all those glorious contentions, by which they meant to secure themselves, and to transmit to their posterity, a known law, a certain rule of living, reduced to this conclusion, that instead of the arbitrary power of a King, we must submit to the arbitrary power of a House of Commons? If this be true, what benefit do we derive from the exchange? Tyranny, my Lords, is detestable in every shape; but in none is it so formidable as where it is assumed and exercised by a number of tyrants. But, my Lords, this is not the fact, this is not the constitution; we have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have Magna Charta, we have the Statute-book, and we have the Bill of Rights...It is to your ancestors, my Lords, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere...I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their Sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people...A breach has been made in the constitution—the battlements are dismantled—the citadel is open to the first invader—the walls totter—the place is no longer tenable.—What then remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or to perish in it?...let us consider which we ought to respect most—the representative or the collective body of the people. My Lords, five hundred gentlemen are not ten millions; and, if we must have a contention, let us take care to have the English nation on our side. If this question be given up, the freeholders of England are reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland...Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins."

- William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

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"Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or the bodies who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects...What, though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit—how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty, and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious, from the nature of things and of mankind; and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money, in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen."

- William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

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"I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America...As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never! ...I call upon the honour of your Lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at THE DISGRACE OF HIS COUNTRY! In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition."

- William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

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"My Lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy! Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. Where is the man that will dare to advise such a measure? My Lords, his Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Surely, my Lords, this nation is no longer what it was! Shall a people, that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible! ...My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!"

- William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

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"If a kind of love cannot be commanded, we can't build our moral theology of marriage on the presumption that it will be present. Its absence is sad, but this sadness exists, it is very common. We should avoid, I think, using the indicative mood for what is really a commandment like the Scout Law ("A Boy Scout is kind to animals" - it means a Boy Scout ought to be kind to animals). For if we hear: "a Christian couple grow in grace and love together" doesn't the question arise "supposing they don't?" It clears the air to substitute the bite of what is clearly a precept for the sweetness of a rosy picture. The command to a Christian couple is: "Grow in grace and love together." But a joint command can only be jointly obeyed. Suppose it isn't? Well, there remains the separate precept to each and in an irremediably unhappy marriage, one ought still to love the other, though not perhaps feeling the affection that cannot be commanded. Thus the notion of the "marriage debt" is a very necessary one, and it alone is realistic: because it makes no assumption as to the state of the affections. Looking at the rightness of the marriage act like this will help in another way. It will prevent us from assuming that the pleasant affection which exists between a happy and congenial pair is the fulfilment of the precept of love. (It may after all only be a complacent hiving off together in a narrow love.) We ought absolutely not to give out a teaching which is flattering to the lucky, and irrelevant to the unhappy. Looked at carefully, too, such teaching is altogether too rigorist in a new direction. People who are not quite happily married, not lucky in their married life, but nevertheless have a loyalty to the bond, are not, therefore, bound to abstain from intercourse."

- G. E. M. Anscombe

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"It would have to be considered from the Imperial point of view whether the system of reciprocal tariffs would really bind the mother country more closely with her colonies than was now the case...how Great Britain might have annually to submit to the pressure of various colonies who were discontented with the tariff as then modified and wanted it modified still further. If they considered Great Britain as a target at which all these proposals for modification and rectification would be addressed, he thought it would occur to their Chamber that it would not altogether add to the harmony of those relations to have these shifting tariffs existing between Great Britain and her colonies. (Cheers)...He thought we should have some form of direct representation from the colonies to guide us and advise us with regard to this question of tariffs...Under a system of free trade every branch of industry did not prosper. He was interested in the landed industry (hear), and he did not know that the land industry had prospered particularly under free trade...he thought it could not be denied that under a system of free trade large tracts of country had been turned out of cultivation, that our own food supply had been diminished, and that the population which had been reared in the rural districts had ceased to be reared in those districts...he was not a person who believed that free trade was part of the Sermon on the Mount, and that we ought to receive it in all its rigidity as a divinely-appointed dispensation."

- Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

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"It is by self-reliance, humanly speaking, by the independence which has been the motive and impelling force of our race, that the Scots have thriven in India and in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, and even in England, where at different times they were banned. As things are we in Scotland do not take much or even ask much from the State, but the State invites us every day to lean upon it. I seem hear the wheedling and alluring whisper, "Sound you may be; we bid you be a cripple. Do you see? Be blind. Do you hear? Be deaf. Do you walk? Be not venturesome; here is a crutch for one arm. When you get accustomed to it you will soon want another, the sooner the better." The strongest man, if encouraged, may soon accustom himself to the methods of an invalid; he may train himself to totter or to be fed with a spoon. The ancient sculptors represent Hercules leaning on his club; our modern Hercules would have his club elongated and duplicated and resting under his arms. (Laughter.) The lesson of our Scottish teaching was "Level up"; the cry of modern civilization is "Level down; let the Government have a finger in every pie," probing, propping, disturbing. ("Hear, hear," and laughter.) Every day the area for initiative is being narrowed, every day the standing ground for self-reliance is being undermined, every day the public infringes, with the best intentions, no doubt, on the individual. The nation is being taken into custody by the State. Perhaps the current cannot now be stemmed; agitation or protest may be alike unavailing; the world rolls on, it may be part of its destiny, a necessary phase in its long evolution, a stage in its blind, toilsome progress to an invisible goal. I neither affirm nor deny. All in the long run is doubtless for the best; but, speaking as a Scotsman to Scotsmen, I plead for our historical character, for the maintenance of those sterling national qualities which have meant so much to Scotland in the past. (Cheers.)"

- Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

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"...it is a revolution without any mandate from the people. (Cheers.) Now, gentlemen, it is in the first place a revolution in fiscal methods...this Budget is introduced as a Liberal measure. If so, all I can say is that it is a new Liberalism and not the one that I have known and practised under more illustrious auspices than these. (Cheers.) Who was the greatest, not merely the greatest Liberal, but the greatest financier that this country has ever known? (A voice, "Gladstone.") I mean Mr. Gladstone. (Cheers.) With Sir Robert Peel—he, I think, occupied a position even higher than Sir Robert Peel—for boldness of imagination and scope of financing Mr. Gladstone ranks as the great financial authority of our time. (Cheers.) Now, we have in the Cabinet at this moment several colleagues, several ex-colleagues of mine, who served in the Cabinet with Mr. Gladstone...and I ask them, without a moment's fear or hesitation as to the answer that would follow if they gave it from their conscience, with what feelings would they approach Mr. Gladstone, were he Prime Minister and still living, with such a Budget as this? Mr. Gladstone would be 100 in December if he were alive; but, centenarian as he would be, I venture to say that he would make short work of the deputation of the Cabinet that waited on him with the measure, and they would soon find themselves on the stairs and not in the room. (Laughter and cheers.) In his eyes, and in my eyes, too, as a humble disciple, Liberalism and Liberty were cognate terms. They were twin-sisters. How does the Budget stand the test of Liberalism so understood and of Liberty as we have always comprehended it? This Budget seems to establish an inquisition, unknown previously in Great Britain, and a tyranny, I venture to say, unknown to mankind...I think my friends are moving on the path that leads to Socialism. How far they are advanced on that path I will not say, but on that path I, at any rate, cannot follow them an inch. (Loud cheers.) Any form of protection is an evil, but Socialism is the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of prosperity, of the monarchy, of Empire. (Loud cheers.)"

- Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

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"If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order... But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured... If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts."

- Henry John Stephen Smith

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"There is complete unity in Pusey's ecclesiastical work. He believed that the true doctrines of the church of England were enshrined in the writings of the fathers and Anglican divines of the seventeenth century, but that the malign influences of whig indifferentism, deism, and ultra-protestantism, had obscured their significance. To spread among churchmen the conviction that on the doctrines of the fathers and early Anglican divines alone could religion be based was Pusey's main purpose. With this aim he set out in company with Newman and Keble. At its inception the movement occasioned secessions to Rome which seriously weakened the English church, and seemed to justify the storm of adverse criticism which the Oxford reformers encountered. Unmoved by obloquy, Pusey, although after the secession of Newman he stood almost alone, never swerved from his original purpose. He possessed no supreme gifts of rhetoric, of literary persuasiveness, or of social strategy. Yet the movement which he in middle life championed almost single-handed proceeded on its original lines with such energy and success as entirely to change the aspect of the Anglican church. This fact constitutes Pusey's claim to commemoration. Of himself he wrote with characteristic self-effacement when reviewing his life: ‘My life has been spent in a succession of insulated efforts, bearing indeed upon one great end—the growth of catholic truth and piety among us.’"

- Edward Bouverie Pusey

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"His great learning, his immense diligence, his scholarlike mind, his simple devotion to the cause of religion, overcame me; and great of course was my joy, when in the last days of 1833 he showed a disposition to make common cause with us... He at once gave to us a position and a name. Without him we should have had no chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression. But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connexions, and his easy relations with University authorities. He was to the Movement all that Mr. Rose might have been, with that indispensable addition, which was wanting to Mr. Rose, the intimate friendship and the familiar daily society of the persons who had commenced it. And he had that special claim on their attachment, which lies in the living presence of a faithful and loyal affectionateness. There was henceforth a man who could be the head and centre of the zealous people in every part of the country, who were adopting the new opinions; and not only so, but there was one who furnished the Movement with a front to the world, and gained for it a recognition from other parties in the University... Dr. Pusey was, to use the common expression, a host in himself; he was able to give a name, a form, and a personality to what was without him a sort of mob; and when various parties had to meet together in order to resist the liberal acts of the Government, we of the Movement took our place by right among them."

- Edward Bouverie Pusey

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"Here we have lying before us an old geography book, printed early in the reign of Charles the First. It is what Mr. Carlyle happily designates "a dumpy quarto"... presenting somewhat the appearance of a modern school-book; and is entitled Mikrokosmos: A Little Description of the Great World. The Fourth Edition. Revised. By Peter Heylyn. Oxford, Printed by W. T. for William Turner and Thomas Huggins. 1629." The first edition appeared in sixteen hundred and twenty-one; so that we see the work was held in no inconsiderable estimation at the time. Indeed, Peter, though now known only to a few inquirers, was a man of some importance during his life; and, for several years after his death, was quoted as an authority. The substance of the quarto now before us was originally delivered in the form of lectures at Magdalen College, Oxford, when the writer was only seventeen years of age; and, being afterwards enlarged, was published as a book. Subsequently, Heylyn entered the Church; became one of the chaplains of Charles I., a great favourite of Laud, and a doughty champion of kingly and priestly domination; suffered for his opinions under the Commonwealth; and finally died in prosperity after the restoration of the Stuarts. He was a ready and voluminous author; and will be regarded with interest as one of our earliest newspaper-press men, having published at Oxford a weekly paper called the Mercurius Aulicus."

- Peter Heylin

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"High Churchman and scholar though was, our friend Heylyn puts on no saturnine or crabbed visage. His manner, on the contrary, is gay, lively, unctuous, flavorous, good-humoured, and full of character. His style has a chuckle in it whenever he can tell you a quaint story or an odd bit of national manners. Great relish for a joke has Peter; and you may now and then catch him telling a naughty tale with a twinkle in the eye. With no solemn pretence of abstruse wisdom does our geographical mentor conduct us on the long pilgrimage through a world; but rather with the air of a genial and well-informed companion, familiar with history, antiquity, and tradition; full of anecdote and illustration; observant of new forms and modes of life; not deficient in the broad daylight of statistics (such as were then known) yet having strong love for glimmering fables and twilight myths; no indiscriminate swallower of lies, though willing to believe any strange tale; and, poet-like, increasing in riches as he passes onward into regions and more remote. Sometimes we laugh with Peter, sometimes at him; yet there is no denying that his book is the result of great industry, great learning, much careful research in many volumes, and considerable literary tact in selection and condensation. Let us dip a little into the old quarto, and see how the world has altered in many things—how remained stationary in some—since the year sixteen hundred and twenty-nine."

- Peter Heylin

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"Here also is a dictum in respect to the political position and power of islands which, could the author be suddenly reanimated, he would find had been startlingly disproved in the course of a few generations. "As concerning the situation of ilands," says Peter, "whether commodious or not, this is my judgment. If a Prince desire rather to keep than augment his dominions, no place fitter for his abode than an iland, as being by itself and Nature sufficiently defensible. But if a King be minded to adde continually unto his empire, an iland is no fit seat for him; because, partly by the uncertainty of winds and seas, partly by the longsomenesse of the wayes, he is not so well able to supply and keep such forces as he hath on the continent. An example hereof is England, which hath even to admiration repelled the most puissant monarch of Europe [ Philip II of Spain ]; but for the causes above-named cannot show any of her winnings on the firme land: though shee hath attempted and atchieved as many glorious exploits as any country in the world." See what genius and energy can effect, even in spite of what seems a very plausible theory. Our insular position remains unchanged; yet we have acquired and maintained a foreign empire greater than Alexander's. On the other hand, Spain, then "the most puissant" of monarchies, has been stripped of nearly all its foreign possessions."

- Peter Heylin

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"There are some... Points relating to Episcopacy, which Dr. Heylyn has long time since cleared and determined. And if some of our pretending States-men had considered and read what was written upon those Subjects, their time and pains would have been more profitably spent to the honor and security of this Church and Kingdom, than in raising doubts and scruples which had long before been so clearly stated and resolved. For, 1. As for Bishops sitting in Parliament to Vote in Causes of Blood and Death, this the Doctor evinced not only in the Tract, entituled, De Jure paritatis Episcoporum, but in his Observations upon Mr. L'Estrange's History, where he says, "that altho the ancient Canons disable Bishops from Sentencing any man to Death, yet they do not from being Assistants in such cases; from taking Examinations, hearing Depositions, of Witnesses, or giving Counsel in such matters as they saw occasion. The Bishops sitting as Peers in the English Parliament, were never excluded from the Earl of Straffords Trial, from any such Assistances, as by their Gravity and Learning and other Abilities, they were enabled to give in any dark and difficult business (tho of Blood and Death) which were brought before them. 2. With the like solid reasoning, the Doctor has evinced the Bishops to be one of the Three Estates."

- Peter Heylin

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"In all things that were either spoke or writ by him, he did loqui cum vulgo so speak as to be understood by the meanest Hearer, and so write as to be comprehended by the most vulgar Reader. "It is true indeed" (as he himself observes) "that when there is necessity of using either Terms of Law, or Logical Notions, or any other words of Art, an Author is then to keep himself to such Terms and Words as are transmitted to us by the Learned in their several Faculties. But to affect new Notions and indeed new Nothings, when there is no necessity to invite us to it, is a Vein of writing which the two great Masters of the Greek and Roman Eloquence had no knowledg of. But knowledg many think that they can never speak elegantly, nor write significantly, except they do it in a language of their own devising, as if they were ashamed of their Mother-Tongue, and thought it not sufficiently curious to express their fancies. By means whereof more French and Latine words have gained ground upon us since the middle of Queen Elizabeth, than were admitted by our Ancestors (whether we look upon them as the British or Saxon Race) not only since the Norman, but the Roman Conquest. A folly handsomly derided in an old blunt Epigram, where the spruce Gallant thus bespeaks his Page, or Laquey Diminutive and my defettive Slave, Reach my Corps Coverture immediately: 'Tis my complacency that Vest to have, T' insconce my person from Frigidity. The Boy believed all Welsh his Master spoke, Till rail'd in English, Rogue go fetch my Cloak.""

- Peter Heylin

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"Though Latin long held sway in Court and bureaucratic circles, the cultural cement of the empire’s core populations was Greek and its education was in the Greek classics and tongue. Imperial tradition, Christian Orthodoxy and Greek culture became even more the bases of Byzantium and her Hellenic community, after she had lost most of her western and Asiatic possessions in the seventh century — to Visigoths and then Arabs m Spain and North Africa, to the Lombards in much of Italy, to the Slavs in the Balkans and to Muslim armies in Egypt and the Near East. Political circumstances, and the resilience of Greek culture and Greek education, made her predominantly Greek in speech and character. After the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the establishment of a Latin empire under Venetian auspices, the rivalry of the Greek empires based on Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond to realize the patriotic Hellenic dream of recapturing the former capital further stimulated Greek ethnic sentiment against Latin usurpation. W1cn in the face of Turkith threats, the fifteenth-century Byzantine emperor, Michael Palaeologus, tried to place the Orthodox Church under the Papacy and hence Western protection; an inflamed Greek sentiment vigorously opposed his policy. The city’s populace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their Hellenic sentiments fanned by monks, priests and the Orthodox party against the Latin policies of the government, actually preferred the Turkish turban to the Latin mitre and attacked the urban wealthy classes. But the Turkish conquest and the demise of Byzantium did not spell the end of the Orthodox Greek community and its ethnic sentiment. tinder its Church and Patriarch, and organized as a recognized milliet of the Ottoman empire, the Greek community flourished in exile, the upper classes of its Diaspora assuming privileged economic and bureaucratic positions in the empire. So Byzantine bureaucratic incorporation had paradoxical effects: as in Egypt, it helped to sunder the mass of the Greek community from the state and its Court and bureaucratic imperial myths and culture in favour of a more demotic Greek Orthodoxy; but, unlike Egypt, the demise of the state served to strengthen that Orthodoxy and reattach to it the old dynastic Messianic symbolism of a restored Byzantine empire in opposition to Turkish oppression."

- Anthony D. Smith

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"This shifted the centre of a truly Hellenic civilization to the east, to the Aegean, the Ionian littoral of Asia Minor and to Constantinople. It also meant that modem Greeks could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.’ There is a sense in which the preceding discussion is both relevant to a sense of Greek identity, now and earlier, and irrelevant. It is relevant in so far as Greeks, now and earlier, felt that their ‘Greekness’ was a product of their descent from the ancient Greeks (or Byzantine Greeks), and that such filiations made them feel themselves to be members of one great ‘super-family’ of Greeks, shared sentiments of continuity and membership being essential to a lively sense of identity. It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage."

- Anthony D. Smith

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"It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted"

- Anthony D. Smith

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"Yet even here all these peoples have remained rooted in their sacred homelands for centuries. Though oppressed and colonized by outsiders, they have never been expelled en masse, and so the theme of restoration to the homeland has played little part in the conceptions of these peoples. There are, however, two peoples, apart from the Jews, for whom restoration of the homeland and commonwealth have been central: the Greeks and the Armenians, and together with the Jews, they constitute the archetypal Diaspora peoples, or what John Armstrong has called ‘mobilized diasporas° Unlike diasporas composed of recent mi migrant workers—Indians, Chinese and others in Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean— mobilized diasporas are of considerable antiquity, are generally polyglot and multi-skilled trading communities and have ancient, portable religious traditions. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians claimed an ancient homeland and kingdom, looked back nostalgically to a golden age or ages of great kings, saints, sages and poets, yearned to return to ancient capitals with sacred sites and buildings, took with them wherever they went their ancient scriptures, sacred scripts and separate liturgies, founded in every city congregations with churches, clergy and religious schools, traded across the Middle East and Europe using the networks of enclaves of their co-religionists to compete with other ethnic trading networks, and used their wealth, education and economic skills to offset their political powerlessness)"

- Anthony D. Smith

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"Against this view, it is still possible to identify some cultural continuities. Kitromilides himself alludes to some of them, when he mentions "inherited forms of cultural expression, such as those associated with the Orthodox liturgical cycle and the images of emperors, the commemoration of Christian kings, the evocation of the Orthodox kingdom and its earthly seat, Constantinople, which is so powerfully communicated in texts such as the Akathist Hymn, sung every year during Lent and forming such an intimate component of Orthodox worship . . ." (Kitromilides 1998, 31). There are other lines of Greek continuity. Despite the adoption of a new religion, Christianity, certain traditions, such as a dedication to competitive values, have remained fairly constant, as have the basic forms of the Greek language and the contours of the Greek homeland (though its centre of gravity was subject to change). And John Armstrong has pointed to the “precocious nationalism” that took hold of the Greek population of the Byzantine Empire under the last Palaeologan emperors and that was directed as much against the Catholic Latins as against the Muslim Turks—an expression of medieval Greek national sentiment as well as a harbinger of later Greek nationalism. But again, we may ask: was this Byzantine sentiment a case of purely confessional loyalty or of ethnoreligious nationalism? (See Armstrong 1982, I74—8I cf. Baynes and Moss 1969, 119—27, and Carras 1983.)"

- Anthony D. Smith

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"O great and wonderful Lord our God, thou only light of the eyes, open, I implore thee, the eyes of my heart, and of others my fellow-creatures, that we may truly understand and contemplate thy wondrous works. And the more thoroughly we comprehend them, the more may our minds be affected in the contemplation with pious reverence and profound devotion. Who is not struck with awe in beholding thy all-powerful will completely efficacious throughout every part of the creation? It is by this same sovereign and irresistible will, that whom and when thou pleasest thou bringest low and liftest up, killest and makest alive. How intense and how unbounded is thy love to me, O Lord! whereas my love, how feeble and remiss! my gratitude, how cold and inconstant! Far be it from thee that thy love should even resemble mine; for in every kind of excellence thou art consummate. O thou who fillest heaven and earth, why fillest thou not this narrow heart? O human soul, low, abject, and miserable, whoever thou art, if thou be not fully replenished with the love of so great a good, why dost thou not open all thy doors, expand all thy folds, extend all thy capacity, that, by the sweetness of love so great, thou mayest be wholly occupied, satiated, and ravished; especially since, little as thou art, thou canst not be satisfied with the love of any good inferior to the One supreme? Speak the word, that thou mayest become my God and most enviable in mine eyes, and it shall instantly be so, without the possibility of failure. What can be more efficacious to engage the affection than preventing love? Most gracious Lord, by thy love thou hast prevented me, wretch that I am, who had no love for thee, but was at enmity with my Maker and Redeemer. I see, Lord, that it is easy to say and to write these things, but very difficult to execute them. Do thou, therefore, to whom nothing is difficult, grant that I may more easily practise these things with my heart than utter them with my lips. Open thy liberal hand, that nothing may be easier, sweeter, or more delightful to me, than to be employed in these things. Thou, who preventest thy servants with thy gracious love, whom dost thou not elevate with the hope of finding thee?"

- Thomas Bradwardine

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"Anyway, I enrolled in Economics and one of the things I read was a brand new book, Hick's Value and Capital. You know, after reading though the mish-mash like Marshall and things like that, suddenly there was this clear, well-organized view, you knew exactly what was happening. Just the sort of thing to appeal to me. There was a whole, messy, confused literature on capital theory; all those great debates between Knight and von Hayek and all that. And now here was just the idea of dated commodities and suddenly scales fell from your eyes. A simple idea like dated commodities made whole issues transparent. But as I read Hicks, I could see there were things left out. I turned to this again when I returned from the War, which was really pretty much of a hiatus in any work I was doing - I was gone and very busy for about three and a half years. I had done all my examinations before I had left. So now it was just a question of my thesis. I decided to take Value and Capital and redo it properly. I could see all kinds of specific points that were of concern. I wanted to combine it with Samuelson's stability theory, which he had developed in the meanwhile, the papers on dynamic stability in '41 and '42. Maybe I would add some stochastic elements to the story because as a student of probability and statistics theory I could see noise in the system. Well, it was a lifetime of work, really; it was a very unrealistic thesis."

- John Hicks

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"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."

- Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky

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"[Neoinstitutional Economics...] theory has made an indispensable contribution in recent times to advances of understanding in this area. But it seems to me that in the economics of institutions theory is now outstripping empirical research to an excessive extent. No doubt the same could be said of other fields in economics, but there is a particular point about this one. Theoretical modelling may or may not be more difficult in this field than in others, but empirical work is confronted by a special difficulty. Because economic institutions are complex, they do not lend themselves easily to quantitative measurement. Even in the respects in which they do, the data very often are not routinely collected by national statistical offices. As a result, the statistical approach which has become the bread and butter of applied economics is not straightforwardly applicable. Examples of it do exist, the literature on the economics of slavery being perhaps the most fully developed - not surprisingly because slavery is an institution that is sharply defined. But to a large extent the empirical literature has consisted of case-studies which are interesting but not necessarily representative, together with a certain amount on legal court cases, which are almost certainly not representative. Is this the best we can do? There is a challenge here on the empirical side to economists to see what is the best way forward."

- R. C. O. Matthews

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"Certain actual sleeping pills cause retrograde amnesia. It can be true that, if I take such a pill, I shall remain awake for an hour, but after my night’s sleep I shall have no memories of the second half of this hour. I have in fact taken such pills, and found out what the results are like. Suppose that I took such a pill nearly an hour ago. The person who wakes up in my bed tomorrow will not be psychologically continuous with me as I was half an hour ago. I am now on psychological branch-line, which will end soon when I fall asleep. During this half-hour, I am psychologically continuous with myself in the past. But I am not now psychologically continuous with myself in the future. I shall never later remember what I do or think or feel during this half-hour. This means that, in some respects, my relation to myself tomorrow is like a relation to another person. Suppose, for instance, that I have been worrying about some practical question. I now see the solution. Since it is clear what I should do, I form a firm intention. In the rest of my life, it would be enough to form this intention. But, when I am no this psychological branch-line, this is not enough. I shall not later remember what I have now decided, and I shall not wake up with the intention that I have now formed. I must therefore communicate with myself tomorrow as if I was communicating with someone else. I must write myself a letter, describing my decision, and my new intention. I must then place this letter where I am bound to notice it tomorrow. I do not in fact have any memories of making such a decision, and writing such a letter. But I did once find such a letter underneath my razor."

- Derek Parfit

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"My Instrument being fixed, I immediately began to observe such Stars as I judged most proper to give me light into the Cause of the Motion... There was Variety enough of small ones; and not less than twelve, that I could observe through all the Seasons of the Year; they being bright enough to be seen in the Day-time, when nearest the Sun. I had not been long observing, before I perceived, that the Notion we had before entertained of the Stars being farthest North and South, when the Sun was about the Equinoxes, was only true of those that were near the solstitial Colure: And after I had continued my Observations a few Months, I discovered what I then apprehended to be a general Law, observed by all the Stars, viz. That each of them became stationary, or was farthest North or South, when they passed over my Zenith at six of the Clock, either in the Morning or Evening. I perceived likewise, that whatever Situation the Stars were in with respect to the cardinal Points of the Ecliptick, the apparent Motion of every one tended the same Way, when they passed my Instrument about the same Hour of the Day or Night; for they all moved Southward, while they passed in the Day, and Northward in the Night; so that each was farthest North, when it came about Six of the Clock in the Evening, and farthest South when it came about Six in the Morning."

- James Bradley

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"If we suppose the distance of the fixed stars from the sun to be so great that the diameter of the earth's orbit viewed from them would not subtend a sensible angle, or which amounts to the same, that their annual is quite insensible; it will then follow that a line drawn from the earth in any part of its orbit to a fixed star, will always, as to sense, make the same angle with the plane of the ecliptic, and the place of the star, as seen from the earth, would be the same as seen from the sun placed in the focus of the ellipsis described by the earth in its annual revolution, which place may therefore be called its true or real place. But if we further suppose that the velocity of the earth in its orbit bears any sensible proportion to the velocity with which light is propagated, it will thence follow that the fixed stars (though removed too far off to be subject to a parallax on account of distance) will nevertheless be liable to an aberration, or a kind of parallax, on account of the relative velocity between light and the earth in its annual motion. For if we conceive, as before, the true place of any star to be that in which it would appear viewed from the sun, the visible place to a spectator moving along with the earth, will be always different from its true, the star perpetually appearing out of its true place more or less, according as the velocity of the earth in its orbit is greater or less; so that when the earth is in its perihelion, the star will appear farthest distant from its true place, and nearest to it when the earth is in its aphelion; and the apparent distance in the former case will be to that in the latter in the reciprocal proportion of the distances of the earth in its perihelion and its aphelion. When the earth is in any other part of its orbit, its velocity being always in the reciprocal proportion of the perpendicular let fall from the sun to the tangent of the ellipse at that point where the earth is, or in the direct proportion of the perpendicular let fall upon the same tangent from the other focus, it thence follows that the apparent distance of a star from its true place, will be always as the perpendicular let fall from the upper focus upon the tangent of the ellipse. And hence it will be found likewise, that (supposing a plane passing through the star parallel to the earth's orbit) the locus or visible place of the star on that plane will always be in the circumference of a circle, its true place being in that diameter of it which is parallel to the shorter axis of the earth's orbit, in a point that divides that diameter into two parts, bearing the same proportion to each other, as the greatest and least distances of the earth from the sun."

- James Bradley

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"Hitherto we have considered the apparent motion of the star about its true place, as made only in a plane parallel to the ecliptic, in which case it appears to describe a circle in that plane; but since, when we judge of the place and motion of a star, we conceive it to be in the surface of a sphere, whose centre is our eye, 'twill be necessary to reduce the motion in that plane to what it would really appear on the surface of such a sphere, or (which will be equivalent) to what it would appear on a plane touching such a sphere in the star's true place. Now in the present case, where we conceive the eye at an indefinite distance, this will be done by letting fall perpendiculars from each point of the circle on such a plane, which from the nature of the orthographic projection will form an ellipsis, whose greater axis will be equal to the diameter of that circle, and the lesser axis to the greater as the sine of the star's latitude to the radius, for this latter plane being perpendicular to a line drawn from the centre of the sphere through the star's true place, which line is inclined to the ecliptic in an angle equal to the star's latitude; the touching plane will be inclined to the plane of the ecliptic in an angle equal to the complement of the latitude. But it is a known proposition in the orthographic projection of the sphere, that any circle inclined to the plane of the projection, to which lines drawn from the eye, supposed at an infinite distance, are at right angles, is projected into an ellipsis, having its longer axis equal to its diameter, and its shorter to twice the cosine of the inclination to the plane of the projection, half the longer axis or diameter being the radius. Such an ellipse will be formed in our present case..."

- James Bradley

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"[Vol. LIV, Anno 1764] XLVIII. Concise Rules for Computing the Effects of Refraction and Parallax in Varying the Apparent Distance of the Moon from the Sun or a Star; also an Easy Rule of Approximation for Computing the Distance of the Moon from a Star, the Longitudes and Latitudes of both being given. By the Rev. , A.M. F.R.S. p. 263. The following rules, excepting one, are the same which Mr. M. before communicated to the R.S., but without demonstration, in a letter from St. Helena, containing the results of his observations of the distance of the moon from the sun and fixed stars, taken in his voyage thither, for finding the longitude of the ship from time to time; since printed in vol. lii. of the Phil. Trans. The two rules for the correction of refraction and parallax, he had also communicated to the public in his British Mariner's Guide to the discovery of longitude from like observations of the moon; and added in the preface a rule for computing a second but smaller correction of parallax, necessary on account of a small imperfection lying in the first rule derived from the fluxions of a spherical triangle. To the rules he has here subjoined their demonstrations. With respect to the usefulness of these rules, he entertains hopes that they will appear more simple and easy than any yet proposed; for the same purpose, the last rule, for computing the distance of the moon from a star, though only an approximation, being so very exact seems particularly adapted for the construction of a nautical , containing the distances of the moon from the sun and proper fixed stars, ready calculated for the purpose of finding the longitude from observations of the moon at sea; an assistance which, in an age abounding with so many able computers, mariners need not doubt they will be provided with, as soon as they manifest a proper disposition to make use of it. A RULE. To compute the contraction of the apparent distance of any two heavenly bodies by refraction; the zenith distances of both, and their distance from each other being given nearly. Add together the tangents of half the sum, and half the difference of the zenith distances; their sum, abating 10 from the index, is the tangent of arc the first. To the tangent of arc the first, just found, add the co-tangent of half the distance of the stars; the sum, abating 10 from the index, is the tangent of arc the second. Then add together the tangent of double the first arc, the co-secant of double the second arch, and the constant logarithm of 114″ or 2.0569: the sum, abating 20 from the index, is the logarithm of the number of seconds required, by which the distance of the stars is contracted by refraction: which therefore added to the observed distance gives the true distance cleared from the effect of refraction. This rule is founded on an hypothesis, that the refraction in altitude is as the tangent of the zenith distance: and the refraction at the altitude of 45 degrees being 57″, according to Dr. Bradley's observations, therefore the refraction at any altitude, calling the radius unity, is 57″ × tangent of the zenith distance. This rule is exact enough for the purpose of the calculation of the longitude from observations of the distance of the moon from stars at sea as low down as the altitude of 10°, for there the error is only 10″ from the truth. But if the altitude of the moon or star be less than 10°, the rule may be still made to answer sufficiently, by only first correcting the observed zenith distances by subtracting from them 3 times the refraction corresponding to them, taken out of any common table of refraction, and making the computation with the zenith distances thus corrected. This correction depends on Dr. Bradley's rule for refraction, which he found to answer, in a manner exactly, from the zenith quite down to the horizon, namely that the refraction is = 57″ × tangent of the apparent zenith distance lessened by 3 times the corresponding refraction taken out of any common table."

- James Bradley

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"It had been long observed that the position of the fixed stars were subject to some variations, which in no sort corresponded with the apparent motion of a degree in seventy-two years, which gives the precission of the equinoxes. The late abbe Picard had remarked these variations in the pole star in 1671, but he did not attempt either to reduce them to any settled rule, or to account for them. Dr. Bradley not only verified Picard's observations, but discovered many other variations which had never before been thought of; he found that some stars appeared to have, in the space of about a year, a variation of longitude backward and forward, but without any variation of latitude, that others, varied in latitude, but not in longitude, and others, by far the greater number, appeared to describe, in the space of a year, a small ellipsis, of different degrees of elongation. The period of a year, in which all these motions, so different from each other, were performed, seemed to prove, that they had a connection with the revolution of the earth in its orbit; but the difficulty was to discover in what manner the stars were apparently influenced by that revolution; this was attempted for some time by Mr. Bradley, but without success; at last, however, his sagacity and his diligence surmounted all difficulties, and he found the cause of these seemingly capricious appearances in the successive motion of light co-operating with the motion of the earth round the sun."

- James Bradley

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"Light had long been supposed to move with a velocity physically infinite, but the late M. Roemer of the Royal Academy of Paris discovered the contrary... But however natural this theory might be, and however well it might be supported, it was then thought too bold, and poor Roemer did not live to see it adopted. It has, however, been since universally a agreed, that the motion of light is successive; and upon this successive motion of light, Mr. Bradley built his explanation of the irregular variations which he had observed in the stars, and which he called their aberation. His theory was this: Let us suppose a series of very small particles, united into a thread, to fall in direction perpendicular to the horizon; and let several of these threads of particles fall at the same time, in he same direction, so as to be parallel to each other, in the same manner as drops of rain in a dead calm. Let us then suppose a tube to be placed in this rain, in a vertical position, and it is manifest that the drop of water which enters the aperture at the upper end of it, will issue at the aperture below, without touching the inside of the tube. But if the tube be moved parallel to itself, though still kept in a position parallel to the direction of the water, it is clear, that this motion of the tube will cause the drop that enters it to touch one of its sides, before it gets to the bottom; and that this contact will happen sooner, in proportion as the motion of the drops is slow, compared with the motion of the tube; and it is easy to demonstrate, that if the motion of the tube, and that of the rain are equal, the drop which falls in the center of the upper aperture of the tube, will come in contact with the inside of the tube, when it has passed down the tube the distance of half its diameter; and, consequently, that the line of its direction will make an angle of five and forty degrees with the axis of the tube: It follows, therefore, that, to prevent the drops of water from touching the inside of the tube, notwithstanding its motion, the tube must be inclined in an angle of five and forty degrees, on the side towards which it moves; and that, if this inclination should be successively made round in the circumference of a circle, the tube would describe round the vertical line, drawn from the centre of its base, a curve, the angle of which would be ninety degrees. But what has been said, with respect to an inclination of the tube necessary to make the drop pass through it... depends upon the proportion between the motion of the tube, and the motion of the drop; and, in proportion as the motion of the drop is greater than that of the tube, the less the tube must be inclined: so that, if the motion of the drop be supposed to be infinite, no inclination at all of the tube would be necessary... In order to apply this theory to the aberration of the fixed stars, we must substitute for the drops of water, uniting into a thread, the rays of light that come from those stars; and, for the tube, which we have supposed to be first at rest, and then in motion, that of the telescope used to determine the position of the stars, which is carried round with the Earth, in its revolution about the Sun; and we must suppose, that the velocity of the ray of light, having a finite relation to the velocity of the Earth's motion, the tube ought to change its inclination, in proportion as that motion changes its direction; whence it follows, that each star must have a series of different positions; or, which is the same thing, an apparent motion in the heavens, which causes it to describe, in the space of a year, ellipses more or less elongated according to its position. From the calculations of this gentleman it follows, that the velocity of light, as fixed by the aberrations of the stars, is the fame with what M Roëmer supposed it to be, and exactly quadrates with the retardation of the eclipses of the first satellite of Jupiter. A new proof of the truth of his hypothesis, if any new proof had been necessary."

- James Bradley

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"Three years after this discovery, by which Mr. Bradley acquired very great reputation, he was appointed Lecturer in Astronomy and Physic, at the Museum at Oxford. He pursued his studies with equal application and delight; and in the course of his observations... he discovered that the inclination of the Earth's axis, upon the plane of the , was not always the same, but that it varied backwards and forwards some seconds, and that the period of these variations was nine years. This period seemed altogether unaccountable, as it could not be supposed to have any thing in common with the revolution of the Earth, which is performed in one year. Mr. Bradley, however, discovered the cause of this phenomenon in the Newtonian system of attraction. The first principle of that system is known to be, that all bodies mutually attract each other in the direct ratio of their masses, and in the inverse ratio of the squares of their distances. From this mutual attraction, combined with motion in a right line, Newton deduces the figure of the orbits of the planets, and particularly that of the Earth. If this orbit was a circle, and if the terrestrial globe was a perfect sphere, the attraction of the Sun would have no other effect than to keep it in its orbit, and would cause no irregularity in the position of its axis; but neither is the Earth's orbit a circle, nor its body a sphere; for the Earth is sensibly protuberant towards the equator, and its orbit is an ellipsis, which has the Sun in its focus. When the position of the Earth is such, that the plane of its equator passes thro' the centre of the Sun, the attractive power of the Sun acts only so as to draw the Earth towards it, still parallel to itself, and without changing the position of its axis, and this happens at the equinoxes. In proportion as the Earth recedes from those points, the Sun also goes out of the plane of the equator, and approaches that of one or other of the tropics; the semidiameter of the Earth, which is then exposed to the Sun, being no longer equal, the equator is more powerfully attracted than the rest of the globe, which causes some alteration in its position, and its inclination upon the plane of the ecliptic; and as that part of the orbit, which is comprized between the autumnal and vernal equinox, is less than that which is comprized between the vernal and the autumnal, it follows, that the irregularity caused by the Sun, during his passage through the northern signs, is not entirely compensated by that which he causes during his passage through the southern signs; and that the parallelism of the terrestrial axis, and its inclination with the ecliptic, will be a little changed. But though the irregularity is now accounted for, we are still at a loss for the cause of its happening in a period of nine years. This difficulty, however, will immediately disappear."

- James Bradley

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"P. xxxiii. The time, within which the cause of aberration occurred to Bradley, is still further narrowed by the following extracts from the minutes of 1728, Nov 14: "Dr. Halley took occasion to speak concerning the late improvements in astronomy made from the new discovery of an annual motion of the fixed stars. ...his colleague, the Rev. Mr. Bradley, resolved to fix up another and more accurate instrument... and after fifteen months almost daily observations on fifteen different stars, has at length discovered not only the laws of the motions, but also the true and manifest cause of them." The instrument having been set up at Wansted on the 17th Aug. 1727, the fifteen months would only have been expiring, and from the expressions which are used, it is clear that the completion of the discovery was then quite recent. Halley, at the end of his report, "desired that a proper notice might be taken of this new discovery of Mr. Bradley, to prevent any other person from laying claim to it before he had sufficient time to prepare and adjust his observations and reflexions on this subject for the public." After the communication was finished, Halley concludes his report by saying, that Bradley was sufficiently convinced of his having discovered the true cause of the phenomena, since he was "able to foretell at any time, the situation of a star being given, how much the variation of it will amount unto, and that with so much exactness, that there does not remain any sensible part unaccounted for, which can be supposed to arise from parallax.—The President proposed that thanks might be returned to Mr. Bradley for the great care and pains which he has taken in his application to this subject, and likewise that it would be proper to advise Mr. Bradley, and hasten him to the publication of his thoughts, as soon as conveniently may be.""

- James Bradley

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"He set too low a value on his own works, and always feared lest any thing might lower his reputation. His love of accuracy, likewise, acted as an impediment: those who take the most comprehensive views have the clearest knowledge of what may be deficient: he could see the improvements which were desirable, and while he had not yet attained them: he was unwilling to send out any thing to the public in a state which he considered to be imperfect. There was also another circumstance which operated against his publishing to any great extent: he certainly composed with difficulty; his writings are full of erasures; and after repeated transcriptions, his language was not always the happiest in its construction or arrangement. He was not remiss in noting what occurred to him, and making memoranda, where the words, which first occurred to him, were sufficient to register his thoughts, and recall them at any future time to his remembrance: but to dwell on the expressions which he should use, and to employ himself in polishing them for publication, seem to have been a task of irksome difficulty to him. No one writes well, who has not studied and practised it; and no one is inclined to acquire the habit, who does not enjoy some degree of facility in the execution of his purpose. It is not therefore astonishing that the voluminous historian of astronomy should have found that "Bradley n'avait presque rien publiée [Bradley had almost published nothing]." Besides the tables of Jupiter's satellites and a few others of no great extent, all that he could be found to have himself given to the world is comprised in seventy-two pages of the present volume. But when every thing is considered, we have no reason for regret; if he had written more for the press, he must have done less for our information;—the facts which he established, and the discoveries which he made, are of an intrinsic and inestimable value, beyond all comparison with any dissertations, in which he might have enlarged upon them."

- James Bradley

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"The iron quadrant of Graham continued to be attached to the eastern face of the wall erected for its support in 1725, and was employed both by Halley and Bradley in observing the celestial bodies which passed the meridian to the south of the . Bradley however was desirous of extending the plan of his observations and... presented a memorial to the Government in the year 1740, soliciting another quadrant, by means of which the stars that passed the meridian to the north of the zenith might be observed. The Government... at once acceded... and in the following year the observatory was furnished with a magnificent brass quadrant of eight feet radius constructed by Bird, who now took the place of Graham, as the most skilful divider of instruments in his day. ...these were finally subdivided by the micrometer screw to every 1″. The Government at the same time furnished the observatory with a new transit telescope by Bird, eight feet long, besides an excellent clock by Shelton...They also purchased of Bradley the famous zenith sector with which he discovered the phenomena of aberration and nutation, and appropriated it to the use of the observatory. This noble instrument was designed by Bradley to be henceforward employed in determining the errors of collimation of the quadrants, by making observations with it when its face was turned alternately east and west."

- James Bradley

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"As soon as Bradley had established these fundamental points he removed the brass quadrant from the western face of the meridian wall, and permanently attached it to the eastern face, where it was afterwards employed in observing the stars that passed the meridian to the south of the zenith. At the same time the iron quadrant was removed from the eastern face of the wall, and, after being re-divided by Bird, was attached to the western face, for the purpose of making observations with the telescope turned towards the north. Bradley now commenced the series of admirable observations which have formed the groundwork of so much valuable research to future enquirers, and which would have assured to him an immortal reputation, even independently of those great discoveries with which his name is inseparably associated. The sun, moon, and principal stars, and the planets when situate in favourable positions, were regularly observed with the transit instrument and the mural quadrants. Moreover, a multitude of small stars, chiefly those of Flamsteed's catalogue were included in the plan of observation. From the year 1750 may be dated the commencement of a series of observations which in point of accuracy may bear a comparison with those of modern times. Henceforward the records of Greenwich Observatory embody a collection of materials, which have almost exclusively formed the groundwork of every investigation undertaken in modern times, for the purpose of improving the solar, lunar, or planetary tables."

- James Bradley

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"And at Greenwich Mason first learned to know Mayer's Tables of the Moon. ...Bradley first reported on Mayer's Tables on February 10, 1756, and finally on April 14, 1760. With the assistance of Charles Mason, Bradley had compared positions of the Moon as predicted in the Tables with positions as observed at Greenwich. Eleven hundred comparisons led to the comment: So far as it will depend upon the lunar tables the true longitude of a ship at sea may in all cases be found within about half a degree and generally much nearer. It remained to be examined within what limits the errors arising from observations actually taken at sea could be contained. This test was carried out for Bradley by Captain Campbell, of H.M.S. Royal George, on cruises near Ushant in 1758 and 1759. A sextant was made especially for the trials by John Bird, instrument maker for Greenwich Observatory. Bradley's final comment reads: However great the difficulties of finding the longitude by this method seem to be, they are not insuperable, or such as ought to deter those whom it most nearly concerns from attempting to remove them. James Bradley was now nearing the end of his days. His hand was faltering. Nevil Maskelyne and Charles Mason received the torch he had carried. They made the development of the method of lunar distances for finding the longitude at sea a major concern of the rest of their lives."

- James Bradley

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"The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as we think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight.Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it.We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again."

- Richard Adams

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"Tonight the Prime Minister has finally announced the next General Election. A moment the country needs – and has been waiting for. And where, by the force of our democracy power returns to you. A chance to change for the better. Your future. Your community. Your country. It will feel like a long campaign – I’m sure of that. But no matter what else is said and done. That opportunity for change is what this election is about. Over the course of the last four years – we have changed the Labour Party. Returned it once more to the service of working people. All we ask now – humbly – is to do exactly the same for our country. And return Britain to the service of working people. To that purpose. We offer three reasons why you should change Britain with Labour. One – because we will stop the chaos. Look around our country. The sewage in our rivers. People waiting on trolleys in A&E. Crime virtually unpunished. Mortgages and food prices – through the roof. It’s all – every bit of it – a direct result of the Tory chaos in Westminster. Time and again, they pursue their own interests. Rather than tackling the issues that affect your family. And if they get another five years, they will feel entitled to carry on exactly as they are. Nothing will change. A vote for Labour is a vote for stability – economic and political. A politics that treads more lightly on all our lives. A vote to stop the chaos. Two – because it’s time for change. Our offer is to reset both our economy and our politics. So that they once again serve the interests of working people. We totally reject the Tory view that economic strength is somehow gifted from those at the top. Over the past fourteen years – through all the crises we have had to face – sticking with this idea has left our country exposed, insecure and unable to unlock the potential of every community. But a vote for Labour is a vote to turn the page on all that. A vote for change. And finally, three – because we have a long-term plan to rebuild Britain. A plan that is ready to go. Fully-costed and fully funded. We can deliver economic stability. Cut the NHS waiting times. Secure our borders with a New Border Security Command. Harness Great British Energy to cut your bills for good. Tackle anti-social behaviour. And get the teachers we need in your children’s classroom. But most of importantly of all, we do all this with a new spirit of service. Country first, party second. A rejection of the gesture politics you will see in this campaign, I have no doubt from the Tories and from the SNP. I am well aware of the cynicism people hold towards politicians at the moment. But I came into politics late, having served our country as leader of the Crown Prosecution Service. And I helped the Police Service in Northern Ireland to gain the consent of all communities. Service of our country is the reason – and the only reason – why I am standing here now – asking for your vote. And I believe with patience, determination and that commitment to service there is so much pride and potential we can unlock across our country. So – here it is – the future of the country – in your hands. On 4th July you have the choice. And together, we can stop the chaos. We can turn the page. We can start to rebuild Britain. And change our country. Thank you."

- Keir Starmer

0 likesMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomLabour Party (UK) politiciansLawyers from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"We did it. You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it and now it has arrived. Change begins now. And it feels good, I have to be honest. Four-and-a-half years of work changing the party. This is what it is for – a changed Labour Party ready to serve our country, ready to restore Britain to the service of working people. And across our country, people will be waking up to the news – relieved that a weight has been lifted, a burden finally removed from the shoulders of this great nation. And now we can look forward again, walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first, but getting stronger through the day, shining once again on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back. And I want to thank each and every one of you here for campaigning so hard for change, and not just in this campaign either – also for these four-and-a-half years changing our party. The Labour movement is always – everything’s achieved past and future – down to the efforts of its people. So thank you truly – you have changed our country. But a mandate like this comes with great responsibility. Our task is nothing less than renewing ideas that hold this country together – national renewal. Whoever you are, wherever you started in life, if you work hard, if you play by the rules, this country should give you a fair chance to get on. It should always respect your contribution and we have to restore that. And alongside that, we have to return politics to public service, show that politics can be a force for good. Make no mistake, that is the great test of politics in this era – the fight for trust is the battle that defines our age. It is why we campaigned so hard on demonstrating we are fit for public service. Service is the pre-condition for hope, respect the bond that can unite a country. Together, the values of this changed Labour Party are the guiding principle for a new government – country first, party second. That is the responsibility of this mandate. You know, 14 years ago, we were told that we're all in it together. I say to the British people today, imagine what we can do if that were actually true. So by all means, enjoy this moment. Nobody can say you haven’t waited patiently. Enjoy the feeling of waking up on a morning like this with the emotion that you do see the country through the same eyes. Hold onto it, because it is what unity is made from, but use it to show to the rest of the country, as we must, that this party has changed, that we will serve them faithfully, govern for every single person in this country. But also don’t forget how we got here. This morning, we can see that the British people have voted to turn the page on 14 years but don’t pretend that there was anything inevitable about that – there’s nothing pre-ordained in politics. Election victories don’t fall from the sky. They’re hard won and hard fought for, and this one could only be won by a changed Labour Party. We have the chance to repair our public services because we’ve changed the party. We have the chance to make work pay because we’ve changed the party. We have the chance to deliver for working people, young people, vulnerable people, the poorest in our society because we’ve changed the party. 'Country first, party second' isn’t a slogan – it's the guiding principle (of) everything we have done and must keep on doing – on the economy, on national security, on protecting our borders. The British people have to look us in the eye and see that we can serve their interest and that work doesn’t stop now – it never stops. The changes we've made are permanent, irreversible and we must keep going. We ran as a changed Labour Party and we will govern as a changed Labour Party. I don't promise you it will be easy. Changing a country's not like flicking a switch, it's hard work, patient work, determined work, and we will have to get moving immediately. But even when the going gets tough, and it will, remember, tonight and always, what this is all about. Now I may have mentioned my parents a few times in this campaign – once or twice – but the sense of security we had, the comfort they took from believing that Britain would always be better for their children, the hope, not high-minded, not idealistic, but a hope that working-class families like mine could build their lives around. It is hope that may not burn brightly in Britain at the moment, but we have earned the mandate to relight the fire. That is the purpose of this party and of this Government. We said we would end the chaos and we will. We said we would turn the page and we have. Today we start the next chapter, begin the work of change, the mission of national renewal and start to rebuild our country. Thank you."

- Keir Starmer

0 likesMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomLabour Party (UK) politiciansLawyers from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"It seems, moreover, that my argument has some relevance to choices we must make even now. There are some species of large predatory animals, such as the Siberian tiger, that are currently on the verge of extinction. If we do nothing to preserve it, the Siberian tiger as a species may soon become extinct. The number of extant Siberian tigers has been low for a considerable period. Any ecological disruption occasioned by their dwindling numbers has largely already occurred or is already occurring. If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals."

- Jeff McMahan (philosopher)

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"That Mahometanism is essentially an obstructive, intolerant system, supplying just sufficient good to stand in the way of greater good. It has consecrated despotism; it has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated slavery. It has declared war against every other creed; it has claimed to be at least dominant in every land. And in one sense it has rightly so claimed. So long as a Mahometan nation is dominant and conquering, so long is it great and glorious after its own standard. When it ceases to have an enemy to contend against, it sinks into sluggish stupidity and into a barbarism far viler than that of the conquerors who raised it to greatness. It must have an enemy; if cut off, like Persia, from conflict with the infidel, it finds its substitute in sectarian hatred of brother Moslems. Islam has founded mighty empires, it has reared splendid palaces, it has accumulated libraries of countless volumes. But it has done nothing for man in his highest earthly capacity, as the citizen of a free state; it has done nothing for the higher even of his purely speculative faculties. By slightly reforming, it has perpetuated and sanctified all the evils of the eastern world. It has, by its aggressive tenets, brought them into more direct antagonism with the creed and civilization of the west. A system, originally the greatest of reforms in its own age and country, has proved the curse and scourge of the world for twelve hundred years."

- Edward Augustus Freeman

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"I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm ."

- Edward Augustus Freeman

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"[I]t may be doubted whether any work of comparable importance in English historical literature has ever been more easy to criticize than Freeman's Norman Conquest. It was in Green's phrase "far too rhetorical and diffuse", and yet despite its excessive length, it concentrated too exclusively upon strictly political events. Nor was the treatment of the authorities itself comprehensive, so that a generation which has been taught to value the record sources of history, and which pays perhaps even an excessive reverence to material which has not yet been printed, is inevitably sceptical of an historian who neglected records, who misinterpreted Domesday Book, and who positively boasted his contempt for manuscripts. Freeman was, in fact, more erudite than critical, and even the narrative sources which were the sure foundation of his work were sometimes by him mishandled. Generally, as J. R. Green remarked, he tended to be unjust to the Norman writers, but otherwise he often gives the impression of giving equal credence to all his authorities and of blending together their contradictory accounts into an unreal synthesis. In this way his account of the crisis of 1051–2 is, for instance, incomprehensibly confused. It must, moreover, be added that, having made up his mind, he could show most obstinate bias towards his sources, selecting only those which could best illustrate his point of view... Freeman's Norman Conquest was, in short, magisterial without being definitive."

- Edward Augustus Freeman

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"Two things caused the decadence of British maritime power: the long peaceful supremacy after Trafalgar and the capture of the navy by that hierarchy of birth and class that controlled so many of Britain's national institutions. Drawing most of its officers from 1 per cent of the nation, the Royal Navy never tapped that great reservoir of urban middle-class talent that made Scheer's fleet so well-educated and so intelligent... The navy reflected social rather than functional values, preoccupation with tradition rather than technology... It was a tragedy for Britain that the aristocracy and gentry had never been cut off from the national life, as had largely happened in France... [T]he social and intellectual values of industrial society never ousted those of the aristocracy. The richer Victorian England became, the more ashamed in a deep sense did she become of the technological origin of those riches. The engineer and the businessman have never been as "respectable" in Britain as in Germany or America... [I]n the world after 1870, when Britain faced the technical challenges of the more complex phase of the industrial revolution and the commercial challenge of foreign competition, the leadership of the country was in the hands of the social group least likely (because of its wealth and privilege) to be aware of the challenges and to respond to them. From 1870 to 1914 Britain was decadent because a decadent ruling social group and decadent (non-functional) values had captured or corrupted the forces of technological and social change."

- Correlli Barnett

0 likesBiographers from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureHistorians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"[T]he essential and constant factor common to all three national academies [in Britain, France and America] is the indoctrination with tradition: potent emotional conditioning in military myth, habits, and attitudes. There are the physical symbols and reminders: engraved tablets of the glorious dead; the museums; the assembled iconography of illustrious graduates; statues; guns... At all three academies there are songs, slang, customs and ceremonies that link each annual class together for the rest of their army life... This indoctrination has grown out of history rather than been artificially created, but it may be doubted whether psychologists or sociologists could improve on it. Upon this mental sub-structure, purely neo-feudalist with its emphasis on glory, gallantry, honour, duty, and patriotism, is built functional and technical training, both concurrently at the academies, and later in schools of application. But it is this indoctrination, together with drill and discipline, that turns civilians into soldiers. Without it there would be no difference between a general in a defence ministry and a high executive in a business cartel. In terms therefore of creating the common character of the military elite, this constant factor of conditioning inside cadet colleges has been of greater importance than the changing detail and emphasis of academic curriculum and military training."

- Correlli Barnett

0 likesBiographers from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureHistorians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"Of course I entirely agree...that the British plight consists in a low-wage, low-investment, low-productivity economy. I suggest...that the peculiar structure, history and attitudes of British trades union is—and has been for a century—largely, although not wholly, responsible for this dismal cycle. You cannot pay high wages unless you have already achieved high productivity. You cannot achieve high productivity unless the workforce is prepared to operate modern machines to the utmost of the machines' capacity. Yet for all the glib talk by trades union leaders about improving productivity, everyone knows that British industry is fettered by demarcations and other restrictive practices aimed at preserving somebody's "property right" in a particular task. This in turn must affect British industry's attitude to investment; for what, it may well think, is the point of investing vast sums in advanced processes if it is not to be permitted to work them to their full potential. Surely, therefore, the necessary switch to a high-wage economy cannot be achieved in isolation, by the process of "free collective bargaining" (ie, extortion of money by menaces or force), but only in step with a parallel switch to high productivity and investment. Are Mr Scanlon's members—and other British workers—prepared to match the efficiency, flexibility, cooperativeness and zeal of German workers—or do they really simply want more money for going on as they are?"

- Correlli Barnett

0 likesBiographers from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureHistorians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and acquisitive, they saw foreign policy in terms of concrete interest: markets, natural resources, colonial real estate, navel bases, profits. At the same time they were concerned to preserve the independence and parliamentary institutions of England in the face of the hostility of European absolute monarchies. Liberty and interest alike seemed to the Georgians therefore to demand a strategic approach to international relations. They saw national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three. They accepted it as natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance. Such public opinion as existed in the eighteenth century did not dissent from this world-view. The House of Commons itself reflected the unsentimental realism of an essentially rural society. Patriotism coupled with dislike and suspicion of foreigners were perhaps the only emotions that leavened the vigorous English pursuit of their interests; a pursuit softened but hardly impeded by the mutual conveniences and decencies of international custom and good manners."

- Correlli Barnett

0 likesBiographers from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureHistorians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"[I]n the course of the first half of the nineteenth century a moral revolution was completed in England; a revolution which was in the long term to exercise decisive influence on the shaping and conduct of English foreign policy. It is indeed in the transformation of the British character and outlook by this moral revolution that lies the first cause, from which all else was to spring, of the British plight in 1940. The revolution had begun to gather momentum in the late Georgian age; a peculiarly English manifestation of the romantic movement common to all Western Europe. The essence of romanticism was to value feeling above calculation or judgement. Romanticism exalted sentiment – soon crudened into sentimentality – over sense... For the first time since the doctrinaire seventeenth century a concern for principle had begun to manifest itself in politics by the early part of George III's reign, when, for example, the war against the rebellious American colonies was denounced by politicians like Burke as unjust as well as unwise... After 1793 Charles James Fox attacked the war with revolutionary France as being an attempt to crush a noble experiment in human liberty rather than the parrying of a national danger. Radicals of the day, like Samuel Whitbread, the brewer MP, were even more passionately moralistic in denouncing English policy and excusing French actions, thereby setting a pattern of emotional response to be followed by the romantic left of politics down to the present day."

- Correlli Barnett

0 likesBiographers from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureHistorians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"The change in the British since the eighteenth century went far deeper than conscious belief. Evangelical religion had modified the national character itself. The violence and quarrelsomeness that had once been noted as English characteristics had vanished, except in working-class districts; replaced by gentleness and readiness to see good in others. Kindness and gentleness indeed were now seen as prime virtues. The hardness, insolence and even arrogance with which Englishmen used to deal with foreigners had given way to an unlimited willingness to see and understand the other man's point of view, even that of an opponent; indeed a willingness to assume, out of a profound though absurd sense of guilt, that his case was morally better founded than their own. Thanks also to Victorian religion – and perhaps to Dickens – the English now evinced a compassion for the underdog and a sympathy for failure, and a corresponding suspicion of ability and success, that were unparalleled in other countries. Thus it followed that the English now preferred the soft handshake of goodwill and reconciliation (in which they placed unbounded trust) to the firm grip of decision and action. Appeasement indeed had become a conditioned reflex of the British middle and upper classes. Few would now say with Palmerston that the practical and sagacious thing to do in life was to carry a point by boldness: knock an opponent down at once, and apologise afterwards if necessary to pacify him."

- Correlli Barnett

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"In terms of British society at home, this transformation of national character was wholly beneficent. It was a great achievement of Victorian moralism to have softened British life and manners; to have created British civic virtue and self-discipline, and brought about standards of personal and public honesty unequalled in the world; to have rendered the law virtually self-enforcing; to have given the British their special sense of the dignity and liberty of the individual, and, as a corollary, their sense of the individual's personal responsibility. Yet it was exactly because British life itself was now so orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding, so decent, so founded on mutual trust that the British were less fitted to survive as a nation than their ancestors, whose characters had been formed in a coarse, tough and brutal society. For the British made the fundamental mistake, catastrophic in all its consequences, of exporting their romantic idealism and their evangelical morality into international relations... And so, in applying the qualities of gentleness, trustfulness, altruism and a strict regard for moral conduct to a sphere of human activity where cunning, cynicism, opportunism, trickery and force, all in the service of national self-interest, still held sway, the twentieth-century British stood disarmed and blinded by their own virtues."

- Correlli Barnett

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"[T]he Cabinet...continued to put their faith in bringing about the "appeasement" of Europe by negotiation; in other words, in reaching a general settlement of all outstanding European problems with the co-operation and consent of Nazi Germany... The Cabinet thus elected to follow a course of action which stood in flat contradiction to their own expressed convictions about the nature and aims of the Nazi régime, and about the worth of the Nazi signature. Nothing could be more in the romantic tradition than so to reject what was dictated by knowledge and commonsense, and instead pursue the impossible but ideal. But this was a Cabinet refulgent with high ideals – high Victorian ideals. By the mid-1930s the direction of English policy had fallen even more completely into the hands of clergymen manqués than during the 1920s and for the most part clergymen manqués now well advanced in middle-age or even into elderliness. In Baldwin's Cabinet in 1936, MacDonald, Runciman, Kingsley Wood, Neville Chamberlain and Simon represented the nonconformist conscience; Halifax and Hoare the High Church; and Inskip the evangelicals. Their approach to world affairs owed no less to Victorian liberalism, for they were deeply imbued with its abhorrence of struggle and its optimistic faith in human reason and goodwill... The political and moral equipment of the English cabinet ministers of 1936–7, being thus designed for an historical situation which had long since disappeared, was useless in the present international environment."

- Correlli Barnett

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"In provoking even the peace-loving and feeble Addington Cabinet into a unanimous decision for war Bonaparte had committed the most catastrophic blunder of his entire career. It sprang in the first place from a failure to understand the English character and English institutions, or comprehend England's strength. Since his youthful studies he had regarded her as the modern Carthage, a mere nation of traders doomed to destruction at the hands of a martial state like France. And certainly there was little about English society that accorded with Bonaparte's own ideas as to what constituted a powerful and well-governed state. Vacillating cabinets precariously depended on the hazardous outcome of parliamentary votes. Instead of the central government directing the national life, the national life arranged itself by some mysterious organic process. The nobility and gentry governed the English shires virtually without reference to London, even controlling the militia, that important part of the English military system. The new volunteer movement had sprung up spontaneously as private and independent associations of citizens. The legal profession and the universities jealously guarded their independence. The City of London, the world's greatest financial centre, formed yet another self-governing republic. The Industrial Revolution, already well under way in England but not yet to begin in Europe, owed everything to personal initiative and nothing to State direction or encouragement. All in all, English society consisted of innumerable co-existing private clubs. The apparent anarchy of the English scene found supreme expression in a free press which hounded politicians, the nobility and even the royal family with cruel lampoons. How could such a cloud of human atoms, such a nation of usurers lacking even a great army, contended against Bonaparte's own logical, efficient military state directed by a single mind of genius?"

- Correlli Barnett

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"It is impossible to exaggerate the long-term consequences, social and psychological, of the experiences of the new industrial workforce in the raw factory settlements of the late Georgian and early Victorian England under conditions of ferocious competition and unbridled exploitation. It was in that era, when men, women and children were flooding into these settlements from the countryside and exchanging the slow, natural rhythms of the land or self-employed crafts (however hard that life might have been) for the harsh mechanical discipline and the pace and clamour of the mill, exchanging the village for the back-to-back terrace, that the British industrial working class, with its peculiar and enduring character as a culture apart, an alienated group often embittered and hostile, was created. It happened that water power and coal and iron largely existed in the bleak, wild landscapes of northern England, South Wales and lowland Scotland – regions hitherto lacking the numerous population and rich civilisation of the south; indeed regions traditionally turbulent and remote from the government of the Crown since the middle ages. Rare it was for the new factory settlements to cluster round an established city, as later would German industries develop round Leipzig and Dresden, Düsseldorf and Cologne: instead villages like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, Halifax, Middlesbrough proliferated into vast brick-built industrial camps; nothing but mean dwellings, drink-shops and "works"."

- Correlli Barnett

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"[W]hereas American workers during the industrialisation of the United States after 1850 never accepted they were permanent members of a coolie class, but believed instead that, true to the American myth, they were merely passing through on their way to prosperous middle-class status, British "coolies" came to accept that working-class they were, and working-class they and their children would always remain; and proud of it. In Hoggart's judgement in 1957, "Most working-class people are not climbing; they do not quarrel with their general level; they only want the little more that allows a few frills." In fact it was an aspect of their conformism that social ambition was positively discouraged as "giving y'self airs", quite apart from an individual's fear anyway of becoming isolated from social roots and family. It is apparent that none of these lasting characteristics, beliefs and attitudes of the British urban working class make for maximum industrial productivity or for maximum speed in adapting to new technologies; indeed the very opposite. Was it not the boss's factory, the boss's product, the boss's market and the boss's profit; and in the boss's interest to bring in new machines? Did not the boss exact – or try to exact – the most work for the least wage? It followed that the worker's only connection with the productive process was to fight the boss as best he could through trade unions or through simple skiving, in order to do as little for as much money as possible; or to protect his job or craft by restrictive practices. So deeply ingrained in the worker was this sense that the productive process, let alone success in the market, was no responsibility of his that it determined his actions even in the midst of the Second World War."

- Correlli Barnett

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"In Britain the pattern was early established, and forever continued, whereby at best management and workforce confronted each other in a state of suspended hostilities, like armies of observation: hardly a pattern that encouraged spontaneous zeal at the bench. In 1879 William Morris, himself a romantic and a socialist, could write: "It is true, and very sad to say, that if anyone nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by a gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he gets it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights..." It was Hoggart's judgement in the early 1950s that fundamentally nothing had changed since Morris's day. And certainly the cumulative evidence about lacklustre output, absenteeism, stoppages and go-slows during the Second World War in industries ranging from coal and shipbuilding to aircraft manufacture bears this out, as does the appalling record for low productivity, strikes and shoddy workmanship which in the 1970s helped to destroy the British motor-vehicle industry. So the degree of motivation explains the performance; the performance demonstrates the degree of motivation; and the nature of the historical experience of the working class accounts for both."

- Correlli Barnett

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"How then was the Admiralty to find a fleet for Singapore, as had been repeatedly promised (though with waning conviction) to Australia and New Zealand before and since the outbreak of war with Germany and Italy? It went far deeper than a mere question of naval strategy and deployment. As Sir Samuel Hoare, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, had remarked to the 1937 Imperial Conference, "the very existence of the British Commonwealth as now constituted" rested on the ability of Britain to send a battlefleet to Singapore. But this in turn posed an even more profound question about Britain's very own existence as the centre of this oceanic empire, the immediate practical implications of which were so starkly confronting her leaders in the summer and autumn of 1941. For in retrospect it can be seen that it was an illusion for the British to believe that the Commonwealth and the Empire made Britain a great world power. Rather the strategic and economic balance sheet in 1941 demonstrates that the Commonwealth and Empire (with the notable exception of Canada and perhaps South Africa) were not an asset, but a net drain on Britain's strength; a predicament. For the imperial pink splashed across the map of the world in British atlases did not represent strength, as the British romantically believed, but one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overstretch in history."

- Correlli Barnett

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"In 1937, the best trading year for Britain between the world wars, the volume of her visible exports amounted to only two-thirds of the 1913 figure. The British share of world trade in manufactures fell from nearly 24 per cent in 1921–5 to 18.6 per cent in 1936–8, whereas Germany's share actually rose from 17.4 per cent to 19.8 per cent, and Japan's from 3.4 per cent to 7 per cent. As a consequence of this slow defeat and retreat in world markets for manufactures Britain was compelled to look more and more to her invisible exports (banking, insurance and shipping services, plus the income from the vast overseas investments built up during the Victorian age) in order to pay for the imports essential to the nation's life and work. Even at the height of her nineteenth-century dominance as a manufacturing country Britain had relied on such invisible exports to keep her balance of payments in equilibrium – indeed to enable her to earn the surpluses to invest overseas. But the percentage of imports that had to be covered by invisible earnings rose from 19.2 per cent in 1870–4 to 44.4 per cent in 1935–9. Even so, Britain by these latter years was incurring an overall balance of payments deficit. Like some ageing industrialist who finds that the shrunken profits from the family firm are no longer enough to pay for his accustomed way of life, Britain had to resort to spending capital. In other words, in the run-up to the Second World War Britain was gradually selling off her foreign investments and using up her gold reserves."

- Correlli Barnett

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"Machine-tools, ball-bearings, magnetos, internal combustion engines, drugs – it is hard to name a basic necessity of advanced technology in which Britain was self-sufficient in 1915... Thus the audit rendered by the first two years of the war on Britain's own capabilities in newer technologies proved harsh enough. Nonetheless, economic historians might object that Britain's Victorian and Edwardian "total strategy" actually served her well enough in wartime. Thanks to her accumulated wealth and her credit as the centre of a global free trade economy and thanks also to British seapower, she could buy in all the technological imports that she needed – largely from North America. But there are two snags here. First, wealth and credit are wasting assets when spent, while the spending only serves to profit other countries' manufacturers and build up their industries. In contrast, up-to-date export industries of your own are long-term earners. Secondly, the high degree to which free trade had rendered Britain dependent on imports of food and raw materials actually brought her near to complete national defeat in 1917 at the hands of the U-boat... Moreover, even though the U-boat was narrowly beaten, Britain had to devote immense naval resources to the merely defensive purpose of keeping open her sea lifelines. This pattern was to be repeated in the Second World War."

- Correlli Barnett

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"Between 1946 and 1950, the most desperate period of the post-war export campaign and of national dependence on American loans and handouts, there were sixteen major strikes in British docks, cumulatively involving nearly 137,000 workers and losing a total of over 1,000,000 worker-days. Between 1950 and 1955...the dockers were out eighteen times playing the big matches and 168 times in instant and short-lived kick-abouts. The big matches drew onto the pitch a cumulative total of nearly 155,000 players, costing nearly 2,000,000 worker-days. But mere statistics cannot properly record the ramifying harm inflicted on British industry and commerce by these repeated blockades. For they meant export delivery dates missed and foreign customers infuriated; factories held up for want of raw materials and equipment from abroad; wholesalers and retailers running out of imported foodstuffs; transport to and from afflicted ports backing up in standstill and confusion; telegrams and telephone calls crowding an out-of-date and already overloaded telecommunications net as victims of the blockades tried to sort out their troubles; and an immense waste of time and effort by ministers and civil servants in attempting to deal with the strikes and their immediate impact. More insidious still was the moral harm done to Britain at home and abroad by such spectacular mutinies, further helping to convey the impression of a nation without disciplined purpose, and instead blindly intent on self-mutilation."

- Correlli Barnett

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"Now...came a further threat to the power of employers (no longer "masters"): the arrival of national trade unions or federations of unions. So the employers too began to organise themselves on an industry-wide scale. Their purpose was well expressed by Colonel Dyer, the American leader of the Federation of Engineering Employers (founded in 1896), in respect of his own industry. It was "to obtain the freedom to manage their own affairs which has proved so beneficial to the American manufacturers as to enable them to compete...in what was formally an English monopoly..." Just how far that freedom had been cumulatively shackled by the past step-by-step gains of the trade unions was revealed by books and newspaper campaigns urging Britain to "wake up" to German and American competition. In 1894 appeared the bestselling British Industries and Foreign Competition. In 1896 followed a "Made in Germany" press panic, on publication of a book under that title. In 1901 the Daily Mail followed a Daily Express series entitled "Wake up England!" with its own on "American Invaders". In 1900–1901 The Times, governing-class opinion incarnate, ran major articles on "The Crisis in British Industry" and "American Competition and Progress". Technical journals critically examined the efficiency of particular industries. All exposed British owners and managers as now widely old-fashioned in outlook, lethargic in action, and smug. But also fully explored was the opposition of the unions to new machines and new methods; the shackling effect of union restrictive practices on efficiency and productivity."

- Correlli Barnett

0 likesBiographers from the United KingdomFellows of the Royal Society of LiteratureHistorians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumni
"Correlli Barnett was another reputable author whose work was pilfered. "I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter", Keith Joseph affirmed in his 1987 interview with Anthony Seldon. In his follow-up question Seldon qualified this: "You are partly a Correlli Barnett man". This showed that the interviewer, at least, had read Barnett's work carefully. In a series of scholarly books and articles Barnett argued that Britain's economic decline could be traced back to an anti-business culture whose foundations were laid by an education system which had been shaped by the model of the public school. Joseph was living evidence that Barnett's theory did not invariably hold good, and indeed some of his detailed points have been criticised. There was a further problem in that Barnett was in no sense an economic liberal; the state, he felt, had not intervened enough in industry. But these minor details did not deter Joseph. Barnett had written that British power collapsed because of a pervasive anti-business culture, and for Joseph that was quite enough to make the historian "one of us". Barnett recognised the differences of principle which Joseph overlooked, but the connection proved useful to him in the 1980s, when Sir Keith and Lord Young encouraged him to put his ideas on vocational training into practice."

- Correlli Barnett

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"In a series of brilliant books Correlli Barnett has made the case against the English élite and its education, telling us that the ethos, curriculum and lifestyle of the public schools and the collegiate universities did little or nothing to prepare the English for the great conflicts of our time. The ideal of the gentleman, with its emphasis on fair play and honesty, left the English at a disadvantage in the struggle against calculating and cynical forces. The classical curriculum put the modern world at too remote a distance from the scholar who had absorbed it; the downgrading of science and technology meant the English were beset by a crippling nostalgia, which caused them to gothicise their industry and surround it with feudal prohibitions. The education instilled by the public schools and the old colleges was, in Barnett's words, not a preparation for the world but an inoculation against it. All such criticisms are based on a mistaken view of education. Relevance in education is a chimerical objective and the English knew this. Who is to guess what will be relevant to a student's interests in ten years' time? Even in the applied sciences, it is not relevance that forms and transforms the curriculum, but knowledge. A relevant technology is one that is relevant to us, here, now. To concentrate on teaching such a technology is to ensure that we remain locked in techniques that will soon be useless."

- Correlli Barnett

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"The starting points of cosmological arguments are evident facets of experience. There is no doubt about the truth of statements that report that they hold. It seems to me equally evident that no argument from any of such starting points to the existence of God is deductively valid. For, if an argument from, for example, the existence of a complex physical universe to the existence of God were deductively valid, then it would be incoherent to assert that a complex physical universe exists and God does not exist. There would be a hidden contradiction buried in such co-assertions. Now, the only way to prove a proposition to be incoherent is to deduce from it an obviously incoherent proposition (for example, a self-contradictory proposition),but, notoriously, attempts to derive obviously incoherent propositions from such co-assertions have failed through the commission of some elementary logical error. Furthermore, it seems easy enough to spell out in an obviously coherent way one way in which such a co-assertion would be true. There would be a complex physical universe and no God, if there had always been matter rearranging itself in various combinations, and the only persons had been embodied persons; if there never was a person who knew everything, or could do everything, etc. Atheism does seem to be a supposition consistent with the existence of a complex physical universe, such as our universe. Of course things may not be as they seem, but, in the absence of any worthwhile argument to the contrary known to me, I shall assume that the non-existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of the universe, and so that the cosmological argument is not a valid, and so not a good, deductive argument. Our primary concern is however to investigate whether it is a good C-inductive or P-inductive argument, and just how much force it has."

- Richard Swinburne

0 likesPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Oxford alumniUniversity of Oxford faculty
"The Russian Revolution and Soviet policy were seen by others, both at the time and subsequently, in part in terms of earlier concerns. Sir Halford Mackinder, Britain’s leading geopolitician as well as a politician, was British High Commissioner in South Russia during the Russian Civil War. He pressed the Cabinet in January 1920 on the danger of ‘a new Russian Czardom of the Proletariat’ and of ‘Bolshevism, sweeping forward like a prairie fire’ towards India, the core of Britain’s overseas empire, and ‘lower Asia’. Such accounts presented Communism as giving renewed energy to established geopolitical drives, notably the Russian threat to the British empire in South Asia (the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’), and to British interests and influence in South-West Asia. This theme has been given even longer-term resonance in some recent scholarship. In offering a borderland perspective on the origins of the Cold War, significantly after the latter was over, Alfred Rieber saw the Cold War as ‘a phase in a prolonged struggle over the Eurasian borderlands that stretches back to the early modern period, when the great polyethnic, bureaucratic conquest empires began to reverse a thousand years of nomadic military hegemony over sedentary cultures’. More of the literature looked for continuity between the Soviet Union and Romanov Russia, and notably with the expansionism of both, for example the search for warm-water ports."

- Halford Mackinder

0 likesGeographers from EnglandAcademics from EnglandPoliticians from EnglandDiplomats of the United KingdomUniversity of Oxford alumni
"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."

- Christopher Dawson

0 likesHistorians from EnglandCatholics from EnglandFellows of the British AcademyUniversity of Oxford alumni
"All my ambition is that I may at some time hereafter, when I am freed from all active concern in such a scene as this is, have the inexpressible satisfaction of being able to look back upon it, and to tell myself that I have contributed to keep my own country at least a little longer from sharing in all the evils of every sort that surround us. I am more and more convinced that this can only be done by keeping wholly and entirely aloof, and by watching much at home, but doing very little indeed; endeavouring to nurse up in the country a real determination to stand by the Constitution when it is attacked, as it most infallibly will be if these things go on; and, above all, trying to make the situation of the lower orders among us as good as it can be made. In this view, I have seen with the greatest satisfaction the steps taken in different parts of the country for increasing wages, which I hold to be a point of absolute necessity, and of a hundred times more importance than all that the most doing Government could do in twenty years towards keeping the country quiet. I trust we may again be enabled to contribute to the same object by the repeal of taxes, but of that we cannot yet be sure. Sure I am, at least I think myself so, that these are the best means in our power to delay what perhaps nothing can ultimately avert, if it is decreed that we are again to be plunged into barbarism."

- William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville

0 likesPrime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandUniversity of Oxford alumniWhig (British political party) politiciansFellows of the Royal Society
"The object of effecting a revolution in this country by inflaming the worst passions of the lowest orders of society has been unremittedly pursued for many years past. During the war its success was in great measure impeded by the large amount of military force then at the disposal of Government, by the extraordinary powers given by Parliament to the Crown, and by the great interest which the mass of our community took, and very justly, in the success of that contest. Since the peace the progress of these designs has been manifestly much more rapid. It has indeed been favoured, from time to time, by circumstances of temporary and local distress; but these have not been greater, they may be truly said to have been much less, than had before been frequently experienced without leading to any such results. So great a change as has been shown since the peace in the general temper and conduct of a large proportion of our population, has perhaps rarely occurred in any country. It seems no exaggeration to say, that if the promoters of general confusion can make as much new way in the next three or four years as they have done in the last, we must consider insurrection and civil bloodshed as inevitable; though even then we may hope that their issue would not be doubtful."

- William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville

0 likesPrime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandUniversity of Oxford alumniWhig (British political party) politiciansFellows of the Royal Society
"He explained with admirable clearness the insecure and alarming state of Ireland. He then went over, case by case, the more dreadful of the outrages which had been committed. He detailed, with striking effect, the circumstances attending the murder of a clergyman, and the agony of his widow, who, after seeing her husband murdered, had to bear the terror of running knocks at the door, kept on all night by the miscreants who had committed the crime. The House became appalled and agitated at the dreadful picture which he placed before their eyes; they felt for the sorrows of the innocent; they were shocked at the dominion of assassins and robbers. When he had produced a thrilling effect by these descriptions, he turned upon O'Connell, who led the opposition to the measure, and who seemed a short time before about to achieve a triumph in favour of sedition and anarchy. He recalled to the recollection of the House of Commons, that at a recent public meeting, O'Connell had spoken of the House of Commons as 658 scoundrels. In a tempest of scorn and indignation, he excited the anger of the men thus designated against the author of the calumny. The House, which two hours before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the storm which his eloquence had raised, Stanley sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of oratory."

- Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby

0 likesPrime Ministers of the United KingdomConservative Party (UK) politiciansWhig (British political party) politiciansUniversity of Oxford alumniLeaders of the House of Lords (United Kingdom)
"I want to go back to about the late 1920s and 1930s when a new type of was invented, called the . These are still in operation today, but the original ones... This is a patent from... and this is 2 Ds as we call them... electrical cavities which would sit inside a whopping great ... [W]e start in the center with some particles, and they always have to be charged particles. So either electrons, s... s, charged atoms. Things like that, and we give them a bit of a kick, because there is a voltage between these two [Ds] halves, and each time the particle moves between those two halves they get a little bit of a kick, a little bit of energy. Now because they're sitting in a whopping great magnetic field, the effect... that has on a charged particle is to actually bend it around a corner. So it bends around a corner and it comes back again crossing this gap, gaining a little bit more energy and... as it continues to gain energy it spirals out... So the limit in the energy in this machine is mostly how big you can build your magnet, and how much iron you're willing to afford. Now this really was the original type of... high energy particle accelerator, and this is a photograph of Ernest Lawrence and his student Milton Stanley Livingston, who I should say, actually built the thing... [T]his machine got up to about 1 million s."

- Suzie Sheehy

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"If any learned man of all our adversaries, or if all the learned men that be alive, be able to bring any one sufficient sentence out of any old catholic doctor, or father, or out of any old general council, or out of the holy scriptures of God, or any one example of the primitive church, whereby it may be clearly and plainly proved that there was any private mass in the whole world at that time, for the space of six hundred years after Christ; Or that there was then any communion ministered unto the people under one kind; Or that the people had their common prayers then in a strange tongue that they understood not; Or that the bishop of Rome was then called an universal bishop, or the head of the universal church; Or that the people was then taught to believe that Christ's body is really, substantially, corporally, carnally, or naturally, in the sacrament... Or that whosoever had said the sacrament is a figure, a pledge, a token, or a remembrance of Christ's body, had therefore been judged for an heretic; Or that it was lawful then to have thirty, twenty, fifteen, ten, or five masses said in one church, in one day; Or that images were then set up in the churches, to the intent the people might worship them; Or that the lay people was then forbidden to read the word of God in their own tongue—if any man alive were able to prove any of these articles by any one clear or plain clause or sentence, either of the scriptures, or of the old doctors, or of any old general council, or by any example of the primitive church; I promised then that I would give over and subscribe unto him."

- John Jewel

0 likesAnglican bishopsUniversity of Oxford alumniChristian apologistsTheologians from EnglandAnglicans from the United Kingdom
"“Indian history is not what we have been taught to believe” and that people are led to feel that the Indian had “no agency in world history”.“To change the narrative of who Indians were historically, see, one of the things I’ve been trying to do and not just through this project, I’ve been writing these history books, is to show that Indian history is not what we have been taught to believe”, he said. “That it’s not the case that Indians were somehow a passive people sitting in India waiting for conquerors to come and give us civilisation and that we have no agency. This is not a history at all”, Sanyal added. “A very little bit of digging into our own history will show us that this is not our history. We have a history. We’ve got a rambunctious history of adventurers and mercenaries and doing all kinds of interesting things”, he said. “One of the things we did was very early on, long before even the Phoenicians, who are famous mariners of history, we were sailing during Harappan times to the Middle East. The seals were found in Mesopotamia”, he said. “We had a port at Lothal and Dholavira and all of these places. But even later, it continues. And that’s why they were sailing out to Indonesia. They were sailing all the way through to Korea”, he said. “In fact, Korean history actually begins with the marriage of a local prince to a princess from Ayodhya”. He added that the legacy of such connections endures to this generation. “The Macaulay mindset is not really about Macaulay the person. What it really is about is this psychological idea that we have imbibed into our nervous system, almost, that we are somehow functioning because civilisation was given to us by other people and that we have never had agency”, he said. “So, okay, the Mughals came and built the Taj Mahal. That’s fine. You know, the British can come and do something, but we should not do anything. So now this is imbued into us in a very fundamental way”, Sanyal said. He added that this attitude continues to shape public discourse even today. “It showed through, for example, when we wanted to build a new Parliament”, he said, underlining how deeply rooted the mindset remains in contemporary thinking."

- Sanjeev Sanyal

0 likesEconomists from IndiaHistorians from IndiaEnvironmentalists from IndiaUniversity of Oxford alumniPeople from Kolkata
"The above remarks about conservatism could be made with equal or even greater force about the Mogul Empire. Despite the sheer size of the kingdom at its height and the military genius of some of its emperors, despite the brilliance of its courts and the craftsmanship of its luxury products, despite even a sophisticated banking and credit network, the system was weak at its core. A conquering Muslim elite lay on top of a vast mass of poverty-stricken peasants chiefly adhering to Hinduism. In the towns themselves there were very considerable numbers of merchants, bustling markets, and an attitude towards manufacture, trade, and credit among Hindu business families which would make them excellent examples of Weber's Protestant ethic. As against this picture of an entrepreneurial society just ready for economic "takeoff" before it was a victim of British imperialism, there are the gloomier portrayals of the many indigenous retarding factors in Indian life. The sheer rigidity of Hindu religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuffs were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions, a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the caste system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and restricted the market; and the influence wielded over Indian local rulers by the Brahman priests meant that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level. Here were the social checks of the deepest sort to any attempts at radical change. Small wonder that later many Britons, having first plundered and then tried to govern India in accordance with Utilitarian principles, finally left with the feeling that the country was still a mystery to them."

- Paul Kennedy

0 likesUniversity of Oxford alumniHistorians from EnglandMembers of the American Philosophical SocietyYale University faculty
"The transfixing of men hung in mid-air was one of the admiral’s favourite forms of execution, since it gave his soldiers good practice. However, there was a strange incident when three among a group of captured sailors from the Coromandel coast threw their hands up to heaven and told him that they wanted to become Christians. Da Gama, unmoved, ordered the interpreter to tell them ‘that even though they became Christians, yet still he would kill them’. The ship’s priest was allowed to baptize them none the less, and as he declaimed the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria they recited his words. ‘When this was done, then they hanged them up strangled, that they might not feel the arrows.’ The crossbowmen transfixed the rest of da Gama’s victims strung from the yardarm; but the arrows which struck the newly-baptized trio ‘did not go in, nor make any mark’. At this, the admiral seemed troubled. The three bodies were shrouded and thrown into the sea, which the chronicler of this event called the Lord’s ‘great mercy’ to gentiles. The priest said prayers and read psalms. However, da Gama was troubled only briefly. When yet another Brahmin was sent from Calicut to plead for peace, he had his lips cut off, and his ears cut off; the ears of a dog were sewn on instead, and the Brahmin was sent back to the Zamorin in that state. He had brought with him three young boys, two of them his sons and a nephew. They were hanged from the yardarm and their bodies sent ashore."

- Richard Seymour Hall

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"That I be the better and the clearer understood of the lay people in some words to be after spoken in this present book, I set now before to them this doctrine taken shortly out of the faculty of logic. An argument, if he be full and formal, which is cleped a syllogism, is made of two propositions, driving out of them, and by strength of them, the third proposition. Of the which three propositions the two first be cleped premisses, and the third following out of them is cleped the conclusion of them. And the first of those two premisses is cleped the first premiss, and the second of them is cleped the second premiss. And each such argument is of this kind, that if the both premisses be true the conclusion concluded out, and by them, is also true; and but if evereither of those premisses be true, the conclusion is not true. Ensample thereof is this: “Each man is at Rome, the Pope is a man, eke the Pope is at Rome.” So here be set forth two propositions, which be these: “Each man is at Rome,” and “The Pope is a man”; and these be the two premisses in this argument, and they drive out the third proposition, which is this: “The Pope is at Rome,” and it is the conclusion of the two premisses. Wherefore, certes, if any man can be sicker for any time that these two premisses be true, he may be sicker that the conclusion is true, though all the angels in heaven would say, and hold that, thilk conclusion were not true. And this is a general rule in every good and formal and full argument, that if his premisses be known for true the conclusion ought be avowed for true, whatever creature will say the contrary.What properties and conditions be required to an argument, that he be full and formal and good, is taught in logic by full, fair, and sure rules, and may not be taught of me here in this present book. But would God it were learned of all the common people in their mother’s language, for then they should thereby be put from much rudeness and boisterousness which they have now in reasoning; and then they should soon know and perceive when a skile and an argument bindeth and when he not bindeth, that is to say, when he concludeth and proveth his conclusion, and when he not so doeth; and then they should keep themselves the better from falling into errors, and they might the sooner come out of errors by hearing of arguments made to them, if they into any errors were fallen; and then they should not be so blunt and so rude and informal and boisterous in reasoning, and that both in their arguing and in their answering, as they now be; and then should they not be so obstinate against clerks and against their prelates, as some of them now be, for default of perceiving when an argument proceedeth into his conclusion of needs, and when he not so doeth, but seemeth only so do. And much good would come forth if a short compendious logic were devised for all the common people in their mother’s language; and, certes, to men of court, learning the king’s law of England in these days, thilk now said short compendious logic were full precious. Into whose making, if God will grant leave and leisure, I purpose sometime after mine other business for to essay."

- Reginald Pecock

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"Even as grammar and divinity be two diverse faculties and cunnings, and therefore be unmeddled, and each of them hath his proper to him bounds and marks, how far and no farther he shall stretch himself upon matters, truths, and conclusions, and not to entermete, neither entermeene, with any other faculty’s bounds; and even as saddlery and tailory be two diverse faculties and cunnings, and therefore be unmeddled, and each of them hath his proper to him bounds and marks, how far and no farther he shall stretch himself forth upon matters, truths, and conclusions, and not intercommune with any other craft or faculty in conclusions and truths: so it is that the faculty of the said moral philosophy and the faculty of pure divinity, or the Holy Scripture, be two diverse faculties, each of them having his proper to him bounds and marks, and each of them having his proper to him truths and conclusions to be grounded in him, as the before-set six first conclusions shew.Wherefore followeth that he unreasonably and reprovably asketh, which asketh where a truth of moral philosophy is grounded in pure divinity or in Holy Scripture, and will not else trow it to be true; like as he should unreasonably and reprovably ask, if he asked of a truth in masonry, where it is grounded in carpentery; and would not else trow it be true, but if it were grounded in carpentery.No man object here against me to be about for to falsify this present thirteenth conclusion; and that, forasmuch as spurriers in London gild their spurs which they make, and cutlers in London gild their knives which they make, as though therefore spurrery and cutlery entermeened and interfered with goldsmith craft, and that these crafts kept not to themselves their proper and several to themselves bounds and marks. For certes though the spurrier and the cutler be learned in thilk point of goldsmith craft which is gilding, and therefore they use thilk point and deed and truth of goldsmith craft, yet thilk point of gilding is not of their craft but only of goldsmith craft; and so the crafts be unmeddled though one workman be learned in them both, and use them both, right as if one man had learned the all whole craft of goldsmithy and the all whole craft of cutlery, and would hold shops of both, and work somewhile the one craft and somewhile the other craft. Yet therefore those crafts in thilk man be not the less diverse, nor never the less keep their severalty in bounds and marks as in themselves, though one man be learned in them both, and can work them both, and hath them both. Yet it is impossible the one of those crafts for to enter and entermete with the truths of the other, though one man can work in them both: for then those two crafts were not two diverse crafts, not subordinate. And thus ought be avoided this objection, right as though a man were a knight and a priest; yet knighthood in thilk man is as far atwin from priesthood in the same man (as by their both natures and beings, though not in place or person), as be knighthood in one person and priesthood in an other person."

- Reginald Pecock

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"Peradventure they will say thus: Many hundreds of men clepe this image the Trinity, and they clepe this image Christ, and this image the Holy Ghost, and this image Mary, and this image Saint Peter, and this image Saint Paul, and so forth of other; and they would not so clepe, but if they felt and believed withinforth as they clepe withoutforth; for else they were double. Wherefore all those hundreds believe amiss about those images. Thereto it is full light for to answer. When I come to thee in thy parish church thou wilt peradventure say to me thus: Lo here lieth my father and there lieth my grandfather, and in the other side lieth my wife; and yet they lie not there, but only their bones lie there. If I come to thee into thine hall or chamber thou wilt peradventure say to me in describing the story painted or woven in thine hall or chamber: “Here rideth King Arthur, and there fighteth Julius Cæsar, and here Hector of Troy throweth down a knight,” and so forth. For though thou thus say thou wilt not hold thee for to say therein amiss. Shall I therefore bear thee hand that thou trowest thy father and thy grandfather and thy wife for to live and dwell in their sepulchres, or shall I bear thee an hand that thou trowest Arthur and Julius Cæsar and Hector to be quick in thy cloth, or that thou wert double in then so ruling of speech? I trow thou wouldest say I were uncourteous, or else unwise and foolish, if I should bear thee so an hand, if it liked thee for to so speak. And, if this be true, it followeth that as well thou art uncourteous, or else thou art to be excused of uncourtesy by thy great folly and madness, if thou bear me an hand that all the world full of clerks and of other laymen ween some images to be God, and some images to be quick Saints; or that they be double and guilefull, if they clepe an image of God by the name of God, and an image of a Saint by the name of a Saint. But (for more clearly this same answer to be understood) it is to wit, that if figurative speeches were not allowed to be had in use, that the image or the likeness of a thing may be cleped by the name of the thing of which he is image and likeness, and that the part of a thing may be cleped under and by the name of his whole, as that men say they have lived forty winters, meaning thereby that they have lived forty years, certes this challenge might well proceed and have his intent; but againward it is so that such figurative and unproper speech, for to clepe the image of a thing by and under the name of the thing of which he is image, hath been in famous use and hath been allowed both of Holy Scripture and of all peoples. And therefore, though men in such woned figurative speech say, “Here at this altar is the Trinity, and there at thilk altar is Jesus, and yonder is the Holy Ghost, and thereby is Mary with Saint Peter,” and so forth; it needeth not therefore be said that they mean and feel that this image is the Trinity, or that thilk image is verily Jesus, and so forth of other; but that these images be the likenesses or the images of them."

- Reginald Pecock

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"For to turn now again into the matter of religious; though it be sufficiently now before answered to the second seeming skile made against those religious, yet into greater strengthening and enforcing of the same made answer and into the more clearing of this truth, that the said religious be not to be cut away from the church, I set thus much more here at this time: Though it were so, that no more excuse were to the said religious for to defend them from cutting away than which is before said (that out, from, and by them no sin cometh in the first said manner, but in the second said manner only; and therefore they deserve not to be cut away, namely sith they be means into great ghostly goods), yet more thereto for to excuse may be set thus: that greater sin would come from, by, and out of the cuttings away of those religious than cometh now from, by, and out of the havings and holdings of the same religious, and greater sin is letted by the being and holding of those religious than is all the sin by them coming; and therefore they ought much rather be maintained than be laid aside. That this is true, what is now said, I prove thus: Take me all the religious men of England, which be now and have been in religion in England this thirty years and more now ended, in which thirty years hath been continual great war betwixt England and France; and let see what should have worthe of the men in these years, if they had not been made religious. Let see how they should have lived, and what manner of men they should have been. Whether not they should have been as wellnigh all other men be and have been in this thirty-fourth winter in England; and therefore they should have been or guileful artificers, or unpitiful questmongers and forsworn jurors, or soldiers waged into France for to make much murther of blood, yea, and of souls, both in their own side and in the French side? Who can say nay thereto, but that right likely and as it were unscapably these evils and many more should have befallen to those persons, if they had not been religious? And no man can find againward that those persons, whiles they have lived in religion, have been guilty of so much sin, how much sin is now rehearsed; and of which they should have been guilty, if they had not been religious. Then followeth of need that the religious in England have been full noble and full profitable hedges and wards throughout these thirty-four years for to close and keep and hedge in and warn so many persons from so much greater sins into which else, if those religious had not been, those persons should have fallen and have been guilty. And soothly this skile (as me seemeth) ought move each man full much for to hold with such religious, if he be wise for to consider how sinful it is wellnigh all persons living out of religion; and into how cumbrous a plight the world is brought, that those sins (as it were) may not be left; and how that religious persons should be of like bad condition, if they were not in religion, and that in religion they be not of so bad condition, though they be men and not angels, and cannot live without all sin; and that the sin coming into them, whiles they be in religion, cometh not into them by the religion as by the first manner of coming before taught in the same chapter, but by the second manner of coming only."

- Reginald Pecock

0 likesNon-fiction authors from WalesRoman Catholic bishopsUniversity of Oxford alumni
"I know no paynt of poetry Can mend such colourd Imag’ry In sullen inke: yet Fayrford, I May relish thy fayre memory. Such is the Ecchoes faynter sound, Such is the light when sunne is drownd; So did the fancy looke upon The worke before it was begunne: Yet when those shewes are out of sight My weaker colours may delight. Those Images so faythfully Report true feature to the eye As you may thinke each picture was Some visage in a looking-glasse; Not a glasse-window face, unlesse Such as Cheapside hath: where a presse Of paynted gallants looking out Bedecke the Casement round about: But these have holy physnomy: Each pane instructs the Laity With silent eloquence: for here Devotion leads the eye, not eare, To note the catechising paynt, Whose easy phrase doth so acquaint Our sense with Gospell that the Creede In sucha hand the weake may reade: Such types even yet of vertue bee, And Christ, as in a glasse wee see. Behold two turtles in one cage, With such a lovely equipage, As they who knew them long may doubt Some yong ones have bin stollen out. When with a fishing rodde the clarke Saint Peters draught of fish doth marke, Such is the scale, the eye, the finne, Youd thinke they strive and leape within; But if the nett, which holds them breake, Hee with his angle some would take. But would you walke a turne in Pauls? Looke uppe; one little pane inroules A fayrer temple: fling a stone The Church is out o’ the windowes throwne. Consider, but not aske your eyes, And ghosts at midday seeme to rise: The Saynts there, striving to descend, Are past the glasse, and downward bend. Looke there! The Divell! all would cry Did they not see that Christ was by: See where he suffers for thee: see His body taken from the Tree: Had ever death such life before? The limber corps, besullyd ore With meager palenesse, doth display A middle state twixt Flesh and Clay: His armes and leggs, his head and crowne, Like a true Lambskinne dangling downe, Who can forbeare, the Grave being nigh, To bring fresh oyntment in his eye? The wondrous art hath equall fate, Unfencd and yet unviolate: The Puritans were sure deceivd, And thought those shadowes movde and heavde, So held from stoning Christ: the winde And boystrous tempests were so kinde As on his Image not to prey, Whom both the winds and seas obey. At Momus wish bee not amazd; For if each Christian heart were glazde With such a window, then each breast Might bee his owne Evangelist."

- William Strode (poet)

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"If Hercules tall stature might bee guest But by his thumbe, wherby to make the rest In due proportion; the best rule that I Would choose to measure Venus’ beauty by Should bee her legg and foot. If husbandmen Measure theyr timber by the foot, why then Not we our wives? Whether wee goe or stride Those native compasses are seldome wide Of telling true: the round and slender foot Is a sure index, and a secrett note Of hidden parts; and well this way may lead Unto the closett of a maydenheade: Here, Emblemes of our youth, we roses tye, And here the garter, love’s deare mystery: For want of beauty here the peacock’s pride Letts fall her trayne, and fearing to bee spide Shutts upp her paynted witnesses to lett Those eyes from view which are but counterfett. Who looks not if this part be good or evill May meet with cloven feet and match the divell, For this doth make the difference betweene The more unhallowed creatures and the cleane, Well may you judge her other stepps are lighte, Her thoughts awry that doth not tread aright: But then there’s true perfection when wee see Those parts more absolute that hidden bee: Nature nere layd a fayre foundation For an unworthy frame to rest upon. Lett others view the topp and limbes throughout, The deeper knowledge is to know the roote: And reading of the face the weakest know, What beauty is; the learned looke below; Who, looking there, doe all the rest, descrie As in a poole the moon we use to spie: Pardon (sweetehart) the pride of my desire If but to kisse your toe it should aspire."

- William Strode (poet)

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"Ratsey raised his glass almost before it was filled. He sniffed the liquor and smacked his lips. 'O rare milk of Ararat!' he said, 'it is sweet and strong, and sets the heart at ease. And now get the backgammon-board, John, and set it for us on the table.' So they fell to the game, and I took a sly sip at the liquor, but nearly choked myself, not being used to strong waters, and finding it heady and burning in the throat. Neither man spoke, and there was no sound except the constant rattle of the dice, and the rubbing of the pieces being moved across the board. Now and then one of the players stopped to light his pipe, and at the end of a game they scored their totals on the table with a bit of chalk. So I watched them for an hour, knowing the game myself, and being interested at seeing Elzevir's backgammon-board, which I had heard talked of before.It had formed part of the furniture of the Why Not? for generations of landlords, and served perhaps to pass time for of the Civil Wars. All was of oak, black and polished, board, dice-boxes, and men, but round the edge ran a Latin inscription inlaid in light wood, which I read on that first evening, but did not understand till Mr. Glennie translated it to me. I had cause to remember it afterwards, so I shall set it down here in Latin for those who know that tongue, Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima jactura arte corrigenda est, and in English as Mr. Glennie translated it, As in life, so in a game of hazard, skill will make something of the worst of throws. At last Elzevir looked up and spoke to me, not unkindly, 'Lad, it is time for you to go home; men say that walks on the first nights of winter, and some have met him face to face betwixt this house and yours.' I saw he wanted to be rid of me, so bade them both good night, and was off home, running all the way thither, though not from any fear of Blackbeard, for Ratsey had often told me that there was no chance of meeting him unless one passed the churchyard by night."

- J. Meade Falkner

0 likesPoets from EnglandNovelists from EnglandChildren's authorsUniversity of Oxford alumni
"Westray looked up and saw the great window at the end of the transept shimmering with a dull lustre; light only in comparison with the shadows that were falling inside the church. It was an insertion of Perpendicular date, reaching from wall to wall, and almost from floor to roof. Its vast breadth, parcelled out into eleven lights, and the infinite division of the stonework in the head, impressed the imagination; while mullions and tracery stood out in such inky contrast against the daylight yet lingering outside, that the architect read the scheme of subarcuation and the tracery as easily as if he had been studying a plan. Sundown had brought no gleam to lift the pall of the dying day, but the monotonous grey of the sky was still sufficiently light to enable a practised eye to make out that the head of the window was filled with a broken medley of ancient glass, where translucent blues and yellows and reds mingled like the harmony of an old patchwork quilt. Of the lower divisions of the window, those at the sides had no colour to clothe their nakedness, and remained in ghostly whiteness; but the three middle lights were filled with strong browns and purples of the seventeenth century. Here and there in the rich colour were introduced medallions, representing apparently scriptural scenes, and at the top of each light, under the cusping, was a coat of arms. The head of the middle division formed the centre of the whole scheme, and seemed to represent a shield of silver-white crossed by waving sea-green bars. Westray’s attention was attracted by the unusual colouring, and by the transparency of the glass, which shone as with some innate radiance where all was dim. He turned almost unconsciously to ask whose arms were thus represented, but the Rector had left him for a minute, and he heard an irritating “Ha, ha, ha!” at some distance down the nave, that convinced him that the story of Sir George Farquhar and the postponed fees was being retold in the dusk to a new victim.Someone, however, had evidently read the architect’s thoughts, for a sharp voice said:“That is the coat of the Blandamers—barry nebuly of six, argent and vert.” It was the organist who stood near him in the deepening shadows. “I forgot that such jargon probably conveys no meaning to you, and, indeed, I know no heraldry myself excepting only this one coat of arms, and sometimes wish,” he said with a sigh, “that I knew nothing of that either. There have been queer tales told of that shield, and maybe there are queerer yet to be told. It has been stamped for good or evil on this church, and on this town, for centuries, and every tavern loafer will talk to you about the ‘nebuly coat’ as if it was a thing he wore. You will be familiar enough with it before you have been a week at Cullerne.”There was in the voice something of melancholy, and an earnestness that the occasion scarcely warranted. It produced a curious effect on Westray, and led him to look closely at the organist; but it was too dark to read any emotion in his companion’s face, and at this moment the Rector rejoined them.“Eh, what? Ah, yes; the nebuly coat. Nebuly, you know, from the Latin nebulum, nebulus I should say, a cloud, referring to the wavy outline of the bars, which are supposed to represent cumulus clouds. Well, well, it is too dark to pursue our studies further this evening, but to-morrow I can accompany you the whole day, and shall be able to tell you much that will interest you.”"

- J. Meade Falkner

0 likesPoets from EnglandNovelists from EnglandChildren's authorsUniversity of Oxford alumni
"In the days of Caesar Augustus There went forth this decree: Si quid rectus et justus Liveth in Galilee, Let him go up to Jerusalem And pay his scot to me.There are passed one after the other Christmases fifty-three, Since I sat here with my mother And heard the great decree: How they went up to Jerusalem Out of Galilee.They have passed one after the other; Father and mother died, Brother and sister and brother Taken and sanctified. I am left alone in the sitting, With none to sit beside.On the fly-leaves of these old prayer-books The childish writings fade, Which show that once they were their books In the days when prayer was made For other kings and princesses, William and Adelaide.The pillars are twisted with holly, And the font is wreathed with yew, Christ forgive me for folly, Youth’s lapses—not a few, For the hardness of my middle life, For age’s fretful view.Cotton-wool letters on scarlet, All the ancient lore, Tell how the chieftains starlit To Bethlehem came to adore; To hail Him King in the manger, Wonderful, Counsellor.The bells ring out in the steeple The gladness of erstwhile, And the children of other people Are walking up the aisle; They brush my elbow in passing, Some turn to give me a smile.Is the almond-blossom bitter? Is the grasshopper heavy to bear? Christ make me happier, fitter To go to my own over there: Jerusalem the Golden, What bliss beyond compare!My Lord, where I have offended Do Thou forgive it me. That so when, all being ended, I hear Thy last decree, I may go up to Jerusalem Out of Galilee."

- J. Meade Falkner

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"His best memorial is his history. Its pages reveal the thoroughness of his workmanship and his single-minded devotion to truth. The book was based on a mass of materials hitherto unknown or imperfectly utilised, and those materials were weighed and sifted with scientific skill. Each new edition was corrected with conscientious care as fresh evidence came to light. In his narrative minute accuracy and wide research were combined with sound judgment, keen insight, and a certain power of imagination. Earlier historians of the period, and some of Gardiner's own contemporaries, had written as partisans. Gardiner succeeded in stating fairly and sympathetically the position and the aims of both parties. He did not confine himself to relating facts, but traced the growth of the religious and constitutional ideas which underlay the conflict. No side of the national life was neglected. He won the praise of experts by his accounts of military and naval operations, elucidated continually the economic and social history of the time, and was the first to show the interaction of English and continental politics. The result of his labours was to make the period he treated better known and better understood than any other portion of English history. A narrative which fills eighteen volumes and took forty years to write is necessarily somewhat unequal as a literary composition. Many critics complained that Gardiner's style lacked the picturesqueness and vivacity of Macaulay or Froude; others that his method was too chronological. There was truth in both criticisms; but the chronological method was chosen because it enabled the historian to show the development of events far better than a more artificial arrangement would have done. He sought to interest his readers by his lucid exposition of facts and the justice of his reflections rather than by giving history the charms of fiction, and was content with the distinction of being the most trustworthy of nineteenth-century historians."

- Samuel Rawson Gardiner

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"The reader must not expect in this work merely the private uninteresting history of a single town. He may expect whatever curious particulars can with any propriety be connected with it. [...] Nor must the general disquisitions and the general narratives of the prefent work be ever confidered as actually digressionary in their natures, and as merely useful in their notices. They are all united with the rest, and form proper parts of the whole. They have fome of them a necessary connexion with the history of Manchester. They have many of them an intimate relation, they have all of them a natural affinity, to it. And the author has endeavoured, by a judicious distribution of them through the work, to prevent that difgusting uniformity, and to take off that uninteresting locality, which must necessarily result from the merely barren and private annals of a town. He has thus in some measure adopted the elegant principles of modern gardening. He has thrown down the close hedges and the high walls that have hitherto confined the antiquarians of our towns in their views. He has called in the scenes of the neighbouring country to his aid, and has happily combined them into his own plan. He has drawn off the attention to the history of Manchester before it became languid and exhausted, by fetching in some objects from the county at large, or by presenting some view of the national history. But he has been cautious of multiplying objects in the wantonness of refinement, and of distracting the attention with a confused variety. He has always considered the history of Manchester as the great fixed point, as the enlivening center, of all his excursions. Every opening is therefore made to carry an actual reference, either mediate or immediate, to the reregular history of Manerester. And every visto is employed only for the useful purpose of breaking the stiff straight lines, of lighting up the dark, of heightening the little, and colouring over the lifeless, in the regular history of Manchester."

- John Whitaker (historian)

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"Probably no function of Conservatism is more important at the present time than to watch over the religious life of the people in the sphere of politics. Religion, as has been pointed out, touches politics very closely in respect to many questions—such as the claims of rich and poor, all measures for ameliorating the condition of the people, the connection between Church and State, and national education. Its indirect influence extends beyond these limits as far as any controversy which raises issues of moral obligation. The championship of religion is therefore the most important of the functions of Conservatism. It is the keystone of the arch upon which the whole fabric rests. As long as Conservatism makes the fulfilment of its duties to religion the first of its purposes, it will be saved from the two principal dangers that alternatively threaten it: the danger of sinking into a mere factious variation of Liberalism, supporting the claims of another set of politicians, but propounding measures not distinguished by any pervading principle: or the other danger of standing only for the defence of those who are well off, without any sincere endeavour to consider the interests of the whole people, or any higher object than the triumph of the sagacious selfishness of the prosperous. Religion is the standard by which the plans of politicians must be judged, and a religious purpose must purify their aims and methods. Emphasising this truth, Conservatism will be the creed neither of a superfluous faction nor of a selfish class."

- Hugh Cecil, 1st Baron Quickswood

0 likesUniversity of Oxford alumniConservative Party (UK) politiciansMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomPeople educated at Eton College
"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

- Tatiana Schlossberg

0 likesWomen journalists from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesUniversity of Oxford alumniYale University alumni
"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."

- A. C. Bradley

0 likesLiterary criticsPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumniFellows of the British Academy
"Lucius Cornelius Sulla was a man of striking appearance, with exceptionally fair skin, piercing grey eyes and reddish hair. In later life his appearance was marred by a skin condition that speckled his face with red patches. (An obscure piece of military law from several centuries later also claims that he had only one testicle, and that his achievements make it clear that such a defect was no bar to becoming a successful soldier.) Sulla could be very charming, winning over soldier and senator alike, but many aristocrats remained deeply uncertain of him. In spite of his late entry into public life he had been reasonably successful, and demonstrated his military skill on repeated occasions. His consulship came when he was fifty, which was unusually old for a first term, and in the preceding decade it had taken two attempts for him to win the praetorship. Many senators probably found it hard to forget the poverty of his youth and the decay of his family. It is common for those who flourish under any system to feel that the failure of others is deserved. Sulla had been poor and revelled in the company of actors and musicians, professions considered extremely disreputable. Such behaviour was bad enough in his youth, and far worse for a senator and magistrate, but Sulla remained loyal to his old friends throughout his life. He was a heavy drinker, enjoyed feasting and was widely believed to be very active sexually, taking both men and women as lovers. For much of his life he publicly associated with the actor Metrobius, who specialised in playing female roles on stage, and the pair were believed to be having an affair."

- Adrian Goldsworthy

0 likesHistorians from the United KingdomNovelists from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from the United KingdomHistorical novelistsUniversity of Oxford alumni