Non Fiction Authors From England

"There is, in fact, thirteen times more land north of the than there is to the south of it. This alone must obviously have a profound influence on —the vast ocean area being almost exclusively represented so far as plant life is concerned, by and ; so far few s, such as the Grass-wracks (), inhabiting salt water."

"YELLOW WATER-LILY. . This beautiful water plant is familiar to all who have ever enjoyed a season of river life, or even to those who make occasional boating excursions on our rivers. It belongs to the same natural order as its more modestly attired sister the , though of a different genus. "In golden armour glorious to behold," it forms a glorious object on the surface or lake or river, and is seen more frequently seen than the White Water-Lily. The golden blossom of this species has a more powerful and not very refined smell resembling ardent spirits, hence it has the common name of Brandy-Bottle. The Greeks prepare a from the flowers."

"The , though they continued the building of immense s, concentrated attention on the s or halls, marvellousily developing the carving of their many rows of monolithic pillars, as may be well seen in and ."

"At one time trees were , principally to provide fuel. Such are the famous , ... pollarded from about 1500 to 1820, when the use of became general; such, too are the numerous pollards in ."

"A Flie, a Mite, or other Insect, are in the same great Chain of Beings; and I but help to fill up the Rank of the Divin Works, I am no more than they. Look upon the Mechanism of a Spider with a Microscopic Eye, upon the Architecture of the Bee, &c. let Man consider the Fineness of their Texture and Composure, and with what Exactness they are form'd, and he will find in himself nothing to be vain of. If I boast of any thing, it is only of being join'd with you in this great Concatenation of Things, and moving with you in one of its Revolutions—My Friend, when we are worn out, and drop insensibly into the Grave, we only leave the Space to be filled up in the next successive Moment, perhaps by some other Race of Creatures, who compleat the Harmony of Wonders in this Structure of the Universe."

"During the last few weeks , , and myself have been exploring an ossiferous at Shandon, near , under a grant from the . Bones of , , bear, wolf, horse, and hare, were found in the débris of a here in 1859, and are now in the . We have worked through a considerable quantity of and , in which and in a thin underlying deposit of cave-earth we have found numerous bones of the above-mentioned animals, indicating at least two individuals of mammoth, eighteen of reindeer, and five of horse, for which latter this is as yet the sole recorded locality in Ireland. The bones of bear show extreme age and signs of disease, and we have found the cast antler of a reindeer. Some of the bones have been gnawed, probably by wolves, and many have been broken by the falling-in of the roof of the cave. Though we have broken into a large chamber, we are as yet unable to form a clear conception of the original form of the cavern. A full account of the cave previous to the present exploration was given by in the ' for June, 1870."

"The s are stated to have burnt their human sacrifices in cages; and, though we cannot with equal confidence vouch for the antiquity of that other more harmless use of the Willow, the making of s to be wielded at , or on any other English greensward, even if we forget altogether its many uses in manufactures, we can find many points of interest in the Willows group. It may as well, however, be mentioned here that the wood, especially that of the , is made into paper pulp, besides affording the best charcoal for artists' crayons; whilst, not to mention the undoubted value of the bark for purposes, it is now well known in the medical world as the source of ."

"Our old-established {[w|Botanical garden|Botanical Gardens}} have long carefully collected those species that have been used in medicine. The , founded by the in 1632, was the first. In 1690 the were placed by under the charge of the botanist (1642-1706), who sent collectors abroad; and about the same date presents the , afterwards rendered famous by the encyclopedic works of (1691-1771), to the . In 1760 the was established by the , under the advice of (1713-1792). who was an enthusiastic botanist ..."

"In the book Biophilia, designer and best-selling author, Sally Coulthard, demonstrates how to transform your living and working spaces into places that put you in touch with nature. The illustrated guide covers key elements for the ‘biophilic home’, including sounds, s, views, colour and natural light. Each section explores the links between home, health and happiness, drawing on environmental research and while making practical suggestions for bringing the natural world into your home."

"...Blood and Flesh with a voracious Appetite we devour, and glut ourselves with slaughter'd Animals, perhaps endued with Reason equal to ourselves; it may be we cannot affirm, that they possess one so perfect as ours, but that Perfection is acquir'd by Discipline, which the Generality of Brutes want. They have not Seminaries of Literature, nor Cambridge, Oxford, nor Eaton or Westminster, where Arts and Sciences are taught by Rules. — No, Nature is their only School-Mistress, and they learn her Instructions with wonderful Promptness and Sagacity. The Elements founded by the infinite Creator serve them as a Book, to teach them all the Knowledge which is necessary for their Well-being here."

"Of the geologically younger s, the is mainly to be found in Yorkshire; , built like so many s with stone found on its own estate, is a fine example. ... ... has been used extensively in and especially Cornwall; it dictates its own forms—gritty, grainy, sparing in ornamentation but magnificently durable."

"Wood does not occur in any plants of a lower grade than ferns; and in the higher plants in which it does occur it is chiefly, but not exclusively, in the stem. The main physiological function of wood is the as it grows erect and branches. Submerged s, buoyed up, as they are, by the water, do not form wood in their stems, nor, as a rule, do s, nor, at first, the succulent, flexible shoots of longer-lived plants. In , and in allied plants, the wood, though dense, consists largely of scattered longitudinal strands and often of cells of no great vertical length. Though there are also generally woody layers just below the surface of the stem, giving it considerable strength as a whole, the structure renders s useless as . For all practical purposes, therefore, wood is produced only by the highest sub-kingdom of the plant world, the seed-bearing or flowering plants, the or Phanerogámia of botanists."

"It’s true, you can go nuts when you suddenly lose someone you love, you fall off the world. I saw in the goshawk — this ferocious, intense, bloodthirsty, murderous creature — what I felt: rage-filled and angry, living in the present with no thought for the future. My mistake was identifying too much with the bird and forgetting how to be a human."

"s nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by s; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies. During World War II, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed , reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar, flashing and twirling as it fell. They mate on the wing. And while young martins and s return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers."

"We are pretty much in the right now, we just expect it to take place in 24 hours. Actually, it just takes place in a slightly longer timeframe. It is going to be grim. We are going to have to adapt."

"Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what s and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries."

"' ... tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a . This isn't as strange as it sounds: Macdonald, who became obsessed with as a child, has flown many falcons over the years, and it's who has died so suddenly, a man she associates strongly with her passion (a press photographer, he and his daughter were good companions, sharing a certain beadiness and the ability to be vastly patient). But in another way it's perverse. Goshawks are by reputation the ruffians of , being bloodthirsty, temperamental and supposedly difficult to tame."

"I am not against the Parliaments setting up a State-Government for such a Church as they shall thinke fit, to make the generality of the Land members of, for I for my part leave them to themselves, to doe what they shall thinke good, so that they leave my Conscience free to the Law and Will of my Lord and King."

"For my part I look upon the House of Commons, as the supream Power of England, who have residing in them that power that is inherent in the people, who yet are not to act according to their own wils and pleasure, but according to the fundamentall constitutions, and customes of the Land, which I conceive provides for the safety and preservation of the people."

"GOD, the absolute Soveraign Lord and King, of all things in heaven and earth, the originall fountain, and cause of all causes, who is circumscribed, governed, and limited by no rules, but doth all things meerly and onely by his soveraign will, and unlimited good pleasure, who made the world, and all things therein, for his own glory, and who by his own will and pleasure, gave man (his meer creature) the soveraignty (under himselfe) over all the rest of his Creatures, Gen. 1.26.28.29. and indued him with a rationall soule, or understanding, and thereby created him after his own image, Gen. 1.26.27. and 9.6. the first of which was Adam, a male, or man, made out of the dust or clay, out of whose side was taken a Rib, which by the soveraign and absolute mighty creating power of God, was made a female, or Woman cal'd Eve, which two are the earthly, original fountain, as begetters and bringers forth of all and every particular and individuall man and woman, that ever breathed in the world since, who are, and were by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority dominion or majesteriall power, one over or above another, neither have they, or can they exercise any, but meerely by institution, or donation, that is to say, by mutuall agreement or consent, given, derived, or assumed, by mutuall consent and agreement, for the good benefit and comfort each of other, and not for the mischiefe, hurt, or damage of any."

"The first, and by no means the least important, consideration of every prospective poultry keeper is the situation and construction of the poultry houses and yards. It is trued that poultry may be kept almost anywhere; good specimens of s have been reared in an attic, and many very fine ones have never known there was any world beyond a small back yard in the street of a county town. These, however, are extreme cases; and success under such disadvantageous conditions can only be achieved by constant attention, extreme cleanliness, and great judgment in supplying artificially those requirements of the birds which the place of confinement does not afford. The best of all s on which to establish a poultry yard is , or sand resting on or a substratum of gravel. If the soil is clayey, or from other causes of wet, the whole should be well drained. This is essential to success, as a wet soil is more inductive than any other circumstance of cramp, , and other diseases."

"This treatise, small as it is, could hardly be regarded as complete, without directions for the manufacture of , a drink so much in fashion, that had some made yearly for her own especial benefit. , an old and quaint bee author, who printed his work entitled "," with a phonetic alphabet of his own invention, gives the exact recipe for making mead, as used by "our renowned Queen Elizabeth of happy memory;" but the taste of our race has become more refined and we should now fail to appreciate the mead brewed with and sweet-briar leaves as relished by the virgin queen ..."

"I am a Free-man, yea, a free borne Denizen of England, and I have been in the field with my sword in my hand, to venter my life and my blood (against Tyrants) for the preservation of my Freedome, and I doe not know that ever I did an act in all my life that disfranchised me of my freedome, and by vertue of being a Free-man, I conceive I have as true a right to all the priviledges that doth belong to a Free-man, as the greatest man in England, whatsoever he be, whether Lord or Commoner, and the ground and foundation of my Freedome, I build upon the grand Charter of England."

"Lilburne's political importance is easy to explain. In a revolution where others argued about the respective rights of king and parliament, he spoke always of the rights of the people. His dauntless courage and his powers of speech made him the idol of the mob. With Coke's Institutes in his hand he was willing to tackle any tribunal. He was ready to assail any abuse at any cost to himself, but his passionate egotism made him a dangerous champion, and he continually sacrificed public causes to personal resentments. It would be unjust to deny that he had a real sympathy with sufferers from oppression or misfortune; even when he was himself an exile he could interest himself in the distresses of English prisoners of war, and exert the remains of his influence to get them relieved... In his controversies he was credulous, careless about the truth of his charges, and insatiably vindictive. He attacked in turn all constituted authorities—lords, commons, council of state, and council of officers—and quarrelled in succession with every ally."

"Hoare's Leviathan is part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale. ... He traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a at . Hoare now frequently travels to as a volunteer on a identification programme."

"Behind me, bare s and es lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, drew the abbey's ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 stayed at on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing scenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle,"

"… He moves from personal to literary history with muscular seamlessness (much as he did in the earlier books). We leap from Melville to Robert Louis Stevenson to the inevitable Byron; from Elizabeth Barrett Browning – “ in ” – to Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. There are passages about Oscar Wilde and , both of whom Hoare addressed in earlier, rather lighter-hearted biographies. There’s some lovely stuff on Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen – “he looks like a boy you knew at school”. … … RisingTideFallingStar is about the author’s relationship to the sea, but then that could be said about both Leviathan and The Sea Inside. What changes with each subsequent book is that the authorial gaze becomes increasingly inward and self-revealing, the tone more forlorn, until some passages in RisingTideFallingStar attain an almost posthumous air, as if the book might also serve as a suicide note."

"The }} constitute by far the larger proportion of the inhabitants of the ; they vary considerably in number at different periods of the year, in consequent of their being short lived, and breeding being arrested during the depth of winter. In spring they become exceedingly numerous; so that, in May or June, a good colony will give off a swarm of more than 20,000 bees, and retain a sufficiency of workers to rear the brood and feed the young grubs that remain behind. This number may appear incredible; as as 300 bees weigh only one , and a good swarm often weighs above five s, the statement admits an easy proof."

"This fascination with the whale, like ’s report from Southampton Water, was an expression of Victorian fashion, a characteristic marriage of ingenious science and human curiosity. In England, live whales were delivered to aquaria in and (although one show was closed, for fear the flagrant activities of its performers should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a arrived in , in the centre of the world's greatest city."

"and possess one great recommendation as sitters, in the soft and abundant supply of downy feathers that so specially distinguish these varieties; for under no other hens do the eggs appear to maintain a higher or more constant temperature."

"If the World was emptied of all but John Lilbourne, Lilbourne would quarrel with John, and John with Lilbourne."

"The structure and habits of the family or group of pigeons are so peculiar and so strikingly distinct from those of any other birds, that they demand special attention. The pigeons were formerly classed by the majority of naturalists along with the , the true poultry, and by others with the or -like birds; but more accurate observation has rendered evident the fact that they form a perfectly distinct family, distinguished from all other birds by the singular manner in which their young are nourished. Unlike the true gallinaceae—which are hatched in a very perfect state and able to follow the parent hen within a few hours after birth—the young pigeons are born in a most immature and helpless condition, and are fed with a curdy secretion, produced in the crops of the parents, the "soft food" of the pigeon-fancier. This is expressly produces at the period of hatching, for the support of the callow young."

"Is John departed? and is Lilburn gone? Farewel to both, to Lilburn and to John, Yet being dead take this advice from me Let them not both in one grave buried be; But lay John here, lay Lilburn hereabout. For if they ever meet they will fal out."

"Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All of this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can't be seen except through what anthropologist described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world."

"As the slipped towards spring and cases of began to blossom horribly across the map of Europe, I was in Costa Rica on a wildlife-watching tour. For two weeks I shared a minibus with a group of retired British folk whose main aim was to see as many birds as possible: we met every evening to tick off the species we’d seen that day from a ready-printed list. We saw s, s, s, s, hawks, a whole cavalcade of tiny , s that snapped and buzzed through the air like animated electrons. ... ... I realised that this trip was disquieting me because we weren’t learning anything much about the birds we saw: we were identifying them, ticking them off a list, and moving on, caught up in a hungry and expectant apperception of the world in which the lived reality of the creatures that flew and sang around us seemed almost entirely obscured by the triumphant, costly light of seeing them."

"Having described the breed known as the Carrier, and the varieties allied to it, we have now to consider the different kinds of s, or those that are remarkable for their powers of flight and their attachment to the home in which they have been reared and first flown. There are numerous varieties that exhibit this peculiarity, such as the Dragon, the ordinary flying , and the Skinnum, or mongrel race, between these two breeds. Among the pure breeds that can be flown good distances may be mentioned that called the . But the varieties in which this homing faculty is developed to the highest degree are unquestionably the different races of Belgian birds, which are termed in England by the general name of Antwerps, and in Belgium are known as , s, Demi Bees, &c."

"s are various creatures and we’ve recruited them to symbolise many things. s are a placeholder for social anxieties: reviled as invading thugs in the , their crime seems little more than failing to treat humans and human spaces with due respect. Other seabirds, like s and s, fall into the anthropomorphised category of cute little guys, mable avian '. And oceanic specialists like s and s spend so much of their lives at sea, visiting their nesting burrows in darkness, they seem barely part of our world at all: the Other rendered in feathers. But in my lifetime, seabirds have symbolised one thing above all: . News photographs of s thickly coated in horrified me when I was young; their gluey silhouettes are still seared into my brain."

"People say, Why didn’t you get a dog? I guess the big question is, Why didn’t you find a human? In a way, I tried. I fell in love with a friend of mine, a very nice man. I think I freaked him out, deeply, because I was broken. He ran away. So maybe there was a feeling that the hawk was safe. But is very strange in that it’s very much about letting things go. These birds are flown free; once you’ve got them tame and trained, you let them go every day! And hope they come back to you. When they do, that reestablishes the sense that things can return."

"And for my owne part, the Lord himselfe hath so firmly by his owne enlightening Spirit so fully convinced me, and setled my soule so unmoveably his truth, that I assuredly know, that all the power in Earth, yea and the gates of Hell It selfe shall never be able to move me or prevaile against me, for the Lord who is the worker of all my workes in me and for me, hath founded and buit me upon that sure & unmoveable foundation the Lord lesus Christ and I know if ten thousand deaths for my conscience and the cause of my God, (for which with courage and rejoycing I now beare witnesse to, and am close prisoner in bonds, lying day and night in Fetters of Iron, both hands & legges) should be inflicted upon me, I should sing, rejoyce & triumph in them all."

"So, over the years, I was regularly asked such things as: Did Jesus exist? Was he mad? Did he ever heal anybody? And the essays included here, to a significant extent, reflect my attempts to answer them. In the world of continuing education, no questions are inadmissible, and no answers, as long as they are carefully and critically argued, are unacceptable."

"Although subsequent generations of Christians would become almost fixated by Jesus’ reputation as a miracle worker and produced ever more elaborate and fantastical traditions, there are good reasons to look closely at the earliest records of this activity."

"If more New Testament scholars could be encouraged to recognise that they are already, to some extent, engaged in psychological analysis of the historical Jesus, and that they are already, as a matter of course, examining data of real potential psychological significance, much could be gained."

"Indeed, if we decide, with Voltaire, that at least some contemporary advocates of the non-historicity of Jesus are really "more ingenious than learned", taking this question seriously may, at the very least, prove beneficial in raising the standard of debate and the wider understanding — in fact, even self-understanding — of what New Testament scholars do and how they do it."

"Marie Stopes, the great apostle of contraception in interwar Britain, was also—like many among the progressives of the time—a keen eugenicist. In 1935, she attended a Congress for Population Science in Nazi Berlin. In August 1939, she even sent Hitler a volume of her dreadful poems, accompanied by a treacly epistle about love. Yet all this has been forgotten amid continuing progressive admiration for Marie Stopes’s embrace of what are nowadays known as "reproductive rights.""

"An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloating."

"Each coming together of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing."

"At sixteen I was vain because someone praised me. My father said: "You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. If you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your own soul's doing. Then you may be proud of it and be loved for it.""

"Each heart knows instinctively that it is only a mate who can give full comprehension of all the potential greatness in the soul, and have tender laughter for all the childlike wonder that lingers so enchantingly even in the white-haired."

"In its most beautiful expression and sublimest manifestations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a world-wide love, in place of the narrower human love of home and children. Many saints and sages, reformers, and dogmatists have modeled their lives on this ideal. But such individuals cannot be taken as the standard of the race, for they are out of its main current: they are branches which may flower, but never fruit in a bodily form."

"We are not much in sympathy with the typical hustling American business man, and we have often felt compunction for him, seeing him nervous and harassed, sleeplessly, anxiously hunting dollars, and all but overshadowed by his over-dressed, extravagant and idle wife, who sometimes insists that her spiritual development necessitates that she shall have no children. Such husbands and wives are also found in this country; they are a growing produce of the upper reaches of the capitalist system. Yet such wives imagine that they are upholding women’s emancipation."