Historians From England

"Sir Walter Besant's work--his novels, records of fact, and, not least, the keen business instinct which led to the incorporation of the Society of Authors--is so widely known and appreciated that it would seem impertinent even to summarise it."

"The procession from Newgate to Tyburn used to pass along Broad Street, and halt at the great gate of the hospital, in order that the condemned man might take his last draught of ale on earth."

"Great and Little Wild Streets are called respectively Old and New Weld Streets by Strype. Weld House stood on the site of the present Wild Court, and was during the reign of James II occupied by the Spanish Embassy. In Great Wild Street Benjamin Franklin worked as a journeyman printer."

"Many a young fellow has found himself in a similar predicament, but I doubt whether anyone ever became so desperately hungry as I did on that day. I recollect that, having rashly eaten up my sausage before eight o'clock, I felt a sinking towards twelve; it was aggravated by the savoury smell of roast meat which steamed from the cookshops and dining-rooms as I walked along the streets. About one o'clock I gazed with malignant envy on the happy clerks who could go in and order platefuls of the roast and boiled which smoked in the windows, and threw a perfume more delicious than the sweetest strains of music into the streets where I lingered and looked. And at two I observed the diners come out again, walking more slowly, but with an upright and satisfied air, while I -- the sinking had been succeeded by a dull gnawing pain -- was slowly doubling up. At half-past two I felt as if I could bear it no longer. I had been walking about, trying different offices for a clerkship. I might as well have asked for a partnership. But I could walk no more."

"This work fascinates me more than anything else I have ever done. I've been walking about London for the last thirty years, and I find something fresh in it every day."

"Some of us can remember how under the old system at Cambridge the Senior Fellows remained in college all their lives, their interests centred in the society, dining in hall everyday, sitting over the College port in the Combination Room every day. Few among the seniors, as one remembers them, were any longer capable of intellectual work."

"I lay it down as one of the distinctive characteristics of a good story that it pleases--or rather, seizes--every period of life; that the child, and his elder brother, and his father, and his grandfather, may read it with like enjoyment."

"Though I cannot claim to be an authority on the subject, I myself have been horrified at the way in which reputable historians have accepted as evidence isolated statements by one peasant extracted under interrogation and torture."

"She continued, 'Theirs was a religion of freedom and joy and not pervaded by fanatical and morbid asceticism as some people would have us believe.' Here again I feel she is absolutely right. The critics of Catharism fail to distinguish between the Parfait and the ordinary croyant. The latter were not required to fast and mortify the flesh any more than the average Hindu or Roman Catholic, even though both Hindu and Catholic priests may regularly practise asceticism as well as meditation and other such disciplines."

"Twenty-six years ago knew and noted in writing what was unknown to any of those who had written on the subject in any language, in the seven centuries which have elapsed since the eclipse of this so-called heresy. All writers who mentioned the subject insisted that the robes of Cathar priests were inevitably black. For twenty-six years, including her six years of correspondence with me, she stubbornly maintained that they were dark blue. She was proved correct by Jean Duvernoy of Toulouse but only in the last four years. In editing the register of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Monsieur Duvernoy revealed that Cathar priests wore sometimes dark blue or dark green. This book was published in 1965. She expressed it in writing more than a year before publication of Duvornoy's book."

"From this patient, and from others like her, I have learnt that seemingly epileptic reactions in adolescents can indicate the latter's capacity to step out of time. In such cases the apparent epileptic tendency disappears as the patient matures."

"The pain was maddening. You should pray to God when you're dying, if you can pray when you're in agony. In my dream I didn't pray to God, I thought of Roger and how dearly I loved him. The pain of those wicked flames was not half so bad as the pain I felt when I knew he was dead. I felt suddenly glad to be dying. I didn't know when you were burnt to death you'd bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes. I hate the thought of gong blind. It's bad enough when I'm awake but in dreams you can't shake the thoughts away. They remain. In this dream I was going blind. I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn't. They must have been burnt off, and now those flames were going to pluck my eyes out with their evil fingers. I didn't want to go blind. The flames weren't so cruel after all. They began to feel cold. Icy cold. It occurred to me that I wasn't burning to death but freezing to death."

"Put aside [the] political and theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites and focus on the group’s shared fundamental beliefs, such as the oneness of Allah, Muhammad’s role as the prophet of Allah, and the five pillars of Islam. Take off your lenses and see through the eyes of someone else."

"These guys calling for Sharia law and marching up the Edgware Road are going to cause havoc whatever happens. Syria is just an excuse for them. Those who use Assad to attack Shias in this country, you say to them, why not speak out against Saudi and Qatar? Saudi is the least democratic country on Earth."

"Sunni and Shia are the main schools in Islam, like Protestant and Catholic. … When you debate with the other school you don’t use vile language or other terms against their respective leaders."

"Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money."

"History repeats itself: historians repeat each other."

"Autobiography—that unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people."

"Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so."

"The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it’s based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it’s got a lot to be said in its favour."

"The study of economic lift-off is well developed; touch-down has not been considered. There is an asymmetry here which would invite comment if applied to aviation."

"The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging."

"At present, we have a policy-response shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives."

"Life-saving information tends to come in local dialects."

"Do nothing that matters without consulting a conversation."

"The reduction of a society and culture to dependence on mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well on the way to destroying it. Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion."

"Coexistence is not toleration; it is resonance; it is the nature of the human ecology."

"Wisdom is intelligence drenched in culture."

"There are two morals to the story. The first is: avoid giving false alarms. The second is: in the end, the wolf came, so do not be misled by previous false alarms into thinking that the latest alarm is false, too. Of these two morals, the second one is more significant. Believing false alarms wastes time, but can lead to some helpful advice for apprentice shepherds; disbelieving all alarms can lead to a local lad being eaten, for starters."

"Reliance on the market economy has led to the asset of a common culture falling into neglect; sometimes we pick through the ruins like tourists marvelling at a lost settlement and guessing at what was once there. It would be helpful—though late in the day—to stop dismantling what remains of a culture in today’s political economy, and to start to re-grow cultural and artistic links as an essential basis for cohesion in a future which, from where we sit, will be barely recognisable."

"Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it."

"At present, culture is decorative rather than structural; although it may lift the spirits ... The Lean Economy, in contrast, will depend for its existence on a deep foundation in culture. It is possible to live without it, but only for a time, like holding your breath under water."

"A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the grammar, the story, humour and good faith that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of social capital. And the social capital of a community is its social life – the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith and reciprocal obligations the civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives."

"If an argument is a good one, dissonant deeds do nothing to contradict it. In fact, the hypocrite may have something to be said for him; it would be worrying if his ideals were not better than the way he lives."

"Holism [is] the art — in contrast with reductionism — of seeing a complex system as a whole. Holism knows the limits to its understanding; it acknowledges that the system has its wildness, its privacy, its own reasons, its defences against invasive explanation ... It does not pretend to understand the whole school just on the evidence of dissecting the geography teacher."

"While democracy has advanced, the part we ordinary citizens have played in the making and sustaining of the places and communities we live in has diminished. Never has so much been decided for so many by so few."

"Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now."

"'The harder I work, the luckier I get'. It was Thomas Jefferson who started the stream of variations on that theme. He should have added, 'The harder I work on one thing, the unluckier I get on all the other commitments I haven’t had time for'."

"It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it."

"Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction."

"Crime is valuable feedback about what childhood in a society means, about its education, economics and culture—about whether this is a society that works or not."

"Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework."

"Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative."

"As people surrender the power to build the institutions they want, which would enable lives that make sense to them, the system as a whole sacrifices the intelligence it needs: it loses its minds."

"The difficult task will not be to move away from our market-based civil society: that will fall away so fast that we will find it hard to believe it was ever there. The task, on the contrary, is to recognise that the seeds of a community ethic—and, indeed, of benevolence—still exist. It is to join up the remnants of local culture that survive, and give it the chance to get its confidence back. We now need to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy senses of the story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where you are, and who is there with you..."

"Under David Cameron, we have this situation where you now need more qualifications to work as a shift manager at McDonald's than to become a teacher."

"I can assure the Right Honorable Gentleman that in this house I see myself as a colossal god-king, a powerful beast from another realm, blessed with the powers of destruction, and I will run through the Palace of Westminster, lashing at all I encounter with the metal prong-whips. And all shall perish."

"A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type."

"A nation is a far more self-conscious community than an ethnicity."

"For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally 'imagined', if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe's primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920."