Non Fiction Authors From England

"Very clearly, Henry cared more for God than for the Church, and more for the Church than for some of the men who exercised office within it."

"Humans are not the only organisms to have affected the live-ability of Earth. Microbes and plants changed the chemistry of the atmosphere long before we leapt on to the stage. Bacteria initiated a momentous change 2.3 billion years ago when they began flooding the air with a noxious gas called oxygen. Microorganisms that had been happily ‘breathing’ iron, sulphur and nitrogen for the first million millennia of biology were decimated by this highly reactive, DNA-damaging molecule. As oxygen levels rose, the metal-breathers and their kin retreated to marine muds and other oxygen-free quarters. New life forms evolved to take advantage of the peculiar conditions and found a way to use oxygen to rip more energy from their food, which is why we breathe deeply today."

"By 1390 the Teutonic Knights were hardly crusaders at all; they were more like a militant Christian state in their own right, making alliances with their neighbors and fighting enemies of various faiths, including fellow Christians."

"Thus there were good political reasons why Henry should not have killed Richard. This is not to say that he did not give the order, only to remind us that one cannot judge innocence or guilt on the strength of motive alone."

"Knowing that he had no respect for opponents who held high office in the Church allows us to contextualise his piety and see a direct link between his God and himself, thereby largely circumventing the role of the clergy. His attitude towards the prelates he executed was that they deserved no special treatment if they stood in the way of God’s will that Henry should rule England. Hence the apparent contradiction of a pious king who executed an archbishop is explained, and a much fuller picture of his religious conscience obtained."

"While we may have some sympathy for Richard, his psychological problems had a disastrous effect on the political situation in England."

"Such a mercurial ruler could hardly be an inspiration to his people. Wise men do not follow leaders whom they suspect might later reproach them for their loyalty."

"He was one in whom the poetical vein was tenderly blended with the philosopher's wisdom."

"The principle of the Church was, in one word, that which defines her own being—a divine authority establishing a kingdom, Jesus Christ, her Lord and Founder, living and acting in her. The consideration of the faith which she promulgated cannot be severed from that of her government and her worship."

"No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the systematic material progress of the whole human race; no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of life; no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal; no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be; no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according to its will; no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquility."

"Our age, the age of the new Prometheans, illustrates as does no other age, the depth of the Promethean myth. Never before have the Prometheans been so daring. Never before have the Epimetheans been so rash and never has Pandora's box been so crammed with menace."

"... Two years ago, I was filming in Madrid for my BBC series on Spanish gardens and was struck by the dogs garden] at , designed by Álvaro Sampedro. Dogs had been very much a part of that design. I thought it was fun and nicely done and, when I got home to Longmeadow, my garden in , it made me think about the ways my dogs use the garden and how they react to it."

"One of the things that has always moved me, and this has often been said by people who are grieving, is that the rhythm of the seasons is a huge comforter. In the bleakest , you trust that spring will come, that the blossom will appear."

"For the Japanese especially, gardens are an essential part of their cultural identity and their history can be measured out in them. In a land of earthquakes and s, gardens are often more durable — and more easily repaired — than buildings. That is not to say that they are easy for the Western visitor to understand or appreciate. Of all the countries I have visited, Japan remains the most enigmatic, drawing you just so close but no further. The cultural divide in the garden — as in almost all other walks of life — remain huge."

"From a small boy I had wanted only to be a and to work on the land. A hurdle-maker's life seemed to me to be ideal, your materials with hand tools in the woods and then making hurdles with hypnotic skill. As a student I had seriously considered becoming a thatcher. In an ideal world I would farm as well, but I had worked on farms and seen that only those with money had any chance of owning their own land and for me, possession was a large part of the draw. The only writing that I considered was fiction. It never crossed my mind to write about gardening, even though by then I had written — and destroyed — a couple of excruciatingly bad novels, and was facing the sneaking suspicion that I might not be any good at it."

"Why, yes, of course I wrote all the Arab of Mesopotamia. I've loved the reviews which speak of the practical men who were the anonymous authors, etc. It's fun being practical men, isn't it."

"As we approach him through contemporary records and chronicles, any sense of the real man beneath the image recedes, never to be caught. Chroniclers tell us what they think he said or did, or that bias or rumour believed he had done or said – and even then they give us a Richard who baffled those around him. But the idea of Richard II is as real an object of historical study as the man himself. When it comes to trying to understand the fate of a king, the idea of him may be the only real object of study there is."

"Being thought to be untrustworthy is no better – indeed in political terms much worse – than actually being untrustworthy."

"The court was by definition in place of extreme instability, of faction and favourites, in which men could rise and fall as they pleased or displeased of the king. For the nation to function at large, this could not be the case. The noble men of the realm needed the security of their patrimony, their status and their rights; for them to support the king they needed to know that he would support the social structure which maintained them all. Richard had demonstrated, fatally, that everything was personal to him."

"Richard’s will was sovereign, and yet it could not be trusted not to change. He had demonstrated that he would erase history, change the statutes of the realm, rather than remit his desires."

"Here and throughout the reign, the tendency was to focus criticism on particular individuals charged with corruption, rather than to address the structures which made such corruption endemic."

"The long story of the medieval cult of chivalry, from its emergence in the twelfth century to its belated glories in the court of the young Henry VIII, is punctuated by the ongoing conflict between knighthood’s idealistic claims to virtue and divine favour, and the Church’s condemnation of all chivalric values as empty and worthless."

"Richard understood his own reign through the distorting lens of the court he made for himself; he could not understand why the regality he regarded as his right was denied to him on the broader stage."

"This kind of moral analysis is characteristic of medieval thought: the aim is to condemn where condemnation is due, but to salvage from the criticism the ideals which animate and support society."

"The government’s reassertion of control over England in the aftermath demonstrated a merciless insistence on the social structure, which tied all into the hierarchy, supporting the king at the top. It was part of Richard’s failure that he did not understand, or would not accept, his throne’s dependence on the stability of that structure."

"The idea of the court sustained Richard, and he sustained it, at vast expense. He surrounded himself with courtiers who stood to gain from his largesse, and who therefore flattered and praised him as he wished. He experienced his court – his day-to-day life of hunting, or feasting, or games – as the place where the king’s will was enacted without question, and he believed that this was as it should be. But beyond his court circle all was very different, in ways which Richard seems not to have understood."

"Richard’s difficulties were many, but the essence of his personal feelings seems to have lain in the confluence of these two great ideas – the divinity of kingship and the perfection of peace – because for Richard, ‘peace’ in the sense that he valued it meant the complete obedience of every subject to the will of the king."

"This is no Henry VIII to command obedience by sheer force of personality; rather, Richard’s image enacts kingship itself, around a curious void. As an individual, he is absent from the portrait; as king, he is presented for our veneration."

"The Londoners’ faithful love and their money were both important to Richard; unfortunately he sought the latter at the expense of the former, while imagining them to be the same thing."

"It took a particular genius and a great deal of luck to make war pay, and Richard had neither."

"Once again, the viewer is made to recognize the sheer glory of kingship, its otherworldly status, and Richard’s distance from his subjects. This majesty is revealed by the actual events of Richard’s life and death to have been empty at its heart."

"Let the pikeman march with a good grace, holding up his head gallantly, his face full of gravity and state and such as is fit for his person; and let his body be straight and as much upright as possible; and that which most important is that they have their eyes always upon their companions which are in rank with them and before them, going just one with another, and keeping perfect distance without committing the least error in pace or step. And every pace and motion with one accord and consent they ought to make at one instant of time. And in this sort all the ranks ought to go sometimes softly, sometimes fast, according to the stroke of the drum.... So shall they go just and even with a gallant and sumptuous pace; for by doing so they shall be esteemed, honoured and commended of the lookers on, who shall take wonderful delight to behold them."

"It is a remorseless criticism of the existing English military system. The author sweeps away bows and bills in a single contemptuous sentence, and lays it down for a dogma that there are but two weapons, for the tall man the pike and for the little nimble man the arquebus. But in the matter of equipment, he notes that the English are lamentably deficient. As good an arquebus could be made in England as in any country, but the armourers had already learned to make cheap and nasty weapons for common sale to the poor men of the shire. Again, other nations carried their powder in flasks or metal cartridges, but the English actually carried theirs loose in their pockets, ready to be kindled by the first spark or spoiled by the first shower, and in any case certain to suffer from waste. Such slovenliness, says the indignant Garrard, is fit only "for wanton skirmish before ladies"; it is impossible for such arquebusiers to attain to the desirable consummation of "a violent, speedy, and thundering discharge." The pikemen, again, instead of a light poniard carried "monstrous daggers like a cutler's shop," fitter for ornament than use. Moreover, the dress of both was open to objection. Colour was a matter of indifference, though some fine hue such as scarlet was preferable for the honour of the military profession, but all military garments should be profitable and commodious, whereas nothing could hamper the limbs more than the great bolstered and bombasted hose that were then in fashion."

"Everything has a cause and the cause of anything is everything."

"When I was but thirteen or so I went into a golden land, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi Took me by the hand."

"The mind of the people is like mud, From which arise strange and beautiful things."

"That there was a tendency for strong and successful kings to be succeeded by weak and unsuccessful ones is one of the commonplaces of medieval English history: Edward I was followed by Edward II, Edward III by Richard II, Henry V by Henry VI, and so on."

"Explaining why he was the first English king to be deposed is in many ways easier than explaining why it took twenty traumatic years to happen. Edward faced challenges that would have tested the abilities of any king; his singular quality was the talent he possessed for alienating those who could have helped him to overcome them."

"What was disturbing was the dichotomy between Edward’s behavior and his almost Olympian view of kingly office. The latter he learned from his father, but whereas Edward I acknowledged (albeit reluctantly) that there were in the end limits to kingly power, his son seems to have been unable to conceive of opposition to his will as anything other than disloyalty. Edward II was enormously stubborn. He was also devious and untrustworthy, continually making promises he had no intention of keeping. He evidently saw nothing wrong in such behavior: it was his birthright, his prerogative."

"These were the men – the earls, bishops and barons – with whom a medieval king had to establish a modus operandi. It was his inability to do so that lay at the heart of Edward II’s failure."

"The grimly inventive repertoire of punishments meted out by both sides during Edward’s reign proclaims it as an age of visceral hatred and almost unparalleled savagery within the English ruling class. Before 1312, no English earl had been executed since 1076; after 1330, it would be nearly sixty years until another was condemned for treason."

"Seeing Robert Bruce mounted on ‘a little palfrey’, Sir Henry de Bohun the nephew of the Earl of Hereford, sought immortality by charging directly at him, but when a blow from Bruce’s axe split his head in two he was obliged to settle for mortality."

"The Gaveston years, 1307 to 1312, set the course of English politics for a decade. Soul-baring and humiliating for the king, they stripped him of his regal mystique and spread a poison through the arteries of the body politic that proved ineradicable as long as Edward occupied the throne; they brutalized and militarized political society; they gave rise to a reform programme that became the touchstone for baronial opposition; and they fatally undermined the English position in Scotland."

"As so often, a quick war was followed by a slow peace."

"Ultimately, however, it was Edward’s inability to fulfill the two overriding obligations of a medieval king – to administer the law without partiality, and to defend his realm – that lay at the heart of his tragedy. This was a very personal failure, the collapse of the moral authority of Edward’s kingship, a resounding endorsement of Aristotle’s much-quoted dictum that a ruler who could not control his private passions would not be able to control his kingdom."

"Edward’s pride in his army – ‘such as has never been seen in our time, or in the times of our ancestors’ – shows that despite twenty years’ experience of campaigning in Scotland he still had not learned from his mistakes."

"Edward’s triumph in 1321-2 gave him the opportunity to establish a strong and responsible rule in England.…England ached for peace, and for the first time since his accession Edward could govern on his own terms. It was an opportunity spectacularly squandered."

"Πολλαὶ μὲν θνητοῖς γλῶτται, μία δ'ἀθανάτοισιν."

"Multæ terricolis linguæ, cœlestibus una."

"... The Whispers of Rock: Stories from the Earth ... is a love letter written with such passion that you can’t help but be moved. Khatwa has devoted much of her life to spreading the gospel of geology, and here she offers clinical, scientific substance to back up her extraordinary depth of feeling. Throughout the book, she is methodical in her explanations of subjects such as how mountains, s and are formed, while also weaving in fascinating details. We learn that the Taj Mahal in India, an iconic symbol of love, was constructed with ivory-white , the origins of which date back to when several primitive land masses collided nearly 2 billion years ago. A recipe incorporating those , , and led to the rock used in this extraordinary monument, a much more complex process than might be realised at first glance. ... Khatwa’s love of rocks emerged as a child, when she walked over . In her book, she takes us with her around the world and across aeons, all the way to her home of 20 years in , UK, where the and its 185 million years of geological history are her neighbours."