people-from-oxford

"In 1980 Earl Anderson published an article in ' on the history of foot races in which he characterised the old women's race in ' as a delightful instance. That view, thankfully, is not replicated elsewhere. Pioneering Burney scholars, including and Kristina Straub, have read the race as symbolic of a social system that dehumanises women and is a literalisation of male brutality."

"Daisy Hay’s nuanced readings of Mary Shelley’s works, combined with photographs of manuscripts, books or physical artefacts from the collection, give readers a vivid picture of Mary Shelley’s time and how she translates life into art. As Hay in the concluding chapter argues, Frankenstein—as a productive, ethical and political metaphor—articulates the anxieties of an age inundated with , innovations and sudden changes."

"became a and a in an age when books appeared to have the potential to change the world. Between 1760 and 1809, the years of Johnson's adulthood, Britain experienced a during which nothing was certain and everything seemed possible. On paper charted the evolution of Britain's relationship first with America and then with Europe: several were intimately involved in the struggles that reformed the ."

"In common with other young writers whose lives were linked with theirs, Shelley, Keats and Byron were indebted to an earlier trio of Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, whose work marked a striking break with the rational, of the early eighteenth century. This break had a profound effect on literary culture in the decades following the French Revolution. Unlike Blake, whose work remained largely unread for decades after his death, Wordsworth and Coleridge were famous in their own time. Contemporaries of both poets were startled by the distinctiveness of their work, and by the ."

"As with all the best s, Hay makes her readers drag their feet towards the end, reluctant to part company with people she has made us know and feel for. Her book has turned the ’ uneven romance into a real love story. How pleased they would have been."

"This is Britain's premier railway and there is a lot of pride in it among staff and passengers. What we are doing is trying to put some pride back in the railway. It is a company that has failed twice, and that inevitably has an impact on the service."

"I think that because I didn't get A-levels and a degree, I always wanted to prove that I was as good as anyone else and I worked very hard."

"huge amount of respect" for Hogg but there is evident impatience in her words – a directness that is also remarked upon by former colleagues."

"In truth, the problems go back to 2006. The operators worked hard to make their payments, but I think decisions were taken that were quite short-term, and we've now got to try to put some of that right."

"It is very early days. We have been here less than a year and we have had a lot to do in that time,"

"Towards the end of National Express's tenure they were scrabbling around to make money in any way they could, like charging for reservations, and quality was suffering"

"Like many young girls, I wanted to be an air stewardess, but I discovered that there was a lot more to travel and transport than working on a plane."

"No king of England was ever so unlucky as John. From the moment when France came to the strong hands of Philip II his conquest of Normandy was only a matter of time. Richard staved off its loss by a fierce concentration on its protection and by reckless expenditure on defence and allies; expedients that brought their own unfortunate consequences for John. Barons who resented both fighting and paying to keep their king's continental lands resented the loss of them only when they found to their surprise that it meant the loss of their own lands in France as well as the king's. After that, there was never confidence and trust between the king and his barons. Each felt resentment against the other."

"The character of this prince is nothing but a complication of vices, equally mean and odious; ruinous to himself, and destructive to his people. Cowardice, inactivity, folly, levity, licentiousness, ingratitude, treachery, tyranny, and cruelty; all these qualities appear too evidently in the several incidents of his life to give us room to suspect, that the disagreeable picture has been any-wile overcharged by the prejudice of the antient historians. It is hard to say, whether his conduct to his father, his brother, his nephew, or his subjects was most culpable; or whether his crimes in these respects were not even exceeded by the baseness, which appeared in his transactions with the King of France, the Pope, and the barons. His dominions, when they devolved to him by the death of his brother, were more extensive than have, ever since his time, been ruled by any English monarch: But he first lost by his misconduct the flourishing provinces in France, the antient patrimony of his family: He subjected his kingdom to a shameful vassalage under the fee of Rome: He saw the prerogatives of his crown diminished by law, and still more reduced by faction: And he died at last, when in danger of being totally expelled by a foreign power, and of either ending his life miserably in prison, or seeking shelter as a fugitive from the pursuit of his enemies."

"In considering the other side of the picture it must be remembered that for lack of evidence judgement must be reserved about the blackest charges against John. Nor should present-day standards of morality be used for judgement of only the unsuccessful kings. Nor should any chronicler be believed who is not strictly contemporary, and is not supported by record evidence when he makes extravagant statements about the king's evil deeds, but when all has been said which may lighten the picture of this most enigmatic king, there remains the mistrustful sovereign who binds his subjects to him by taking their sons as hostages for good behaviour, who charges individuals, even his best servants, with an insupportable weight of debt, who forces every debtor to find sufficient sureties to cover the whole obligation so that the sureties themselves become enmeshed, who seems as irresponsible in his occasional pardons as in his impositions; the king whose arbitrary conduct drives his subjects to rebellion."

"The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that it was no weak and indolent voluptuary, but the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom."

"For John even in the abject humiliation of his end we have no word of pity as we have had none of sympathy. He has deserved none. He has no policy of either aggression or defence. We do not credit him with a deliberate design on the rights of his people, simply because he never showed the consciousness of any rights they had, but took his own evil way in contempt of law, and in a wilful ignoring of dangers he dared not face. He made no plans and grasped at no opportunities. He was persistent only in petty spite and greedy of easy vengeance. He staked everything on the object of the moment and made no effort to avert his ruin until it was consummated. He looked neither before him nor behind him, drew as little from experience as he sacrificed to expediency, or as he utilised the present for the ends of the future. He had not sufficient regard for virtue to make him play the hypocrite, and lost even the little defence that such a cloak gives to kings. He had neither energy, capacity, nor honesty; he availed himself neither of the help of those who had common interests, nor of the errors of those whom he regarded as his enemies. He met honest service with contempt, and the best advice with the treatment due to dangerous conspiracy. He is an exception to the class of men who are well hated only in this, that none even pretended to love him. And as he is without wisdom for himself, he has no care for his people; on them, the weaker and more innocent the better, he wreaks the vengeance, the savage vengeance, that the stronger and less innocent have provoked, as if burning villages and slaying peasants was an enjoyment to be set against defeat in council and disgrace in the field. And now the heart that was obdurate against the sufferings of the people, that had been unmoved by the cries of the tortured as it was inexorable to the prayers of friendship, virtue, and sorrow, is broken by the loss of his treasure. And he who had defied God by word and deed all his life, sought shelter from the terrors with which superstition, not conscience, had inspired him, by being buried in the habit of a monk: a posthumous tribute to religion, which he had believed only to outrage."

""Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John." The terrible verdict of the King's contemporaries has passed into the sober judgment of history. Externally John possessed all the quickness, the vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm which distinguished his house. He was fond of books and learned men, he was the friend of Gerald as he was the student of Pliny. He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of winning the love of women. But in his inner soul John was the worst outcome of the Angevins. He united into one mass of wickedness their insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical indifference to honour or truth."

"He was certainly a great prince, but enjoyed no great success and, like Marius, met with both kinds of luck. He was generous and liberal to aliens but he plundered his own people. He ignored those who were rightfully his men and placed his trust in strangers. Before his end his people deserted him, and at his end few mourned for him."

"In the five centuries since Columbus discovered the New World, savagery has been part of American life. There has been the violence of conquest and resistance, the violence of racial difference, the violence of civil war, the violence of bandits and gangsters, the violence of lynch law, all set against the violence of the wilderness and the city."

"For 11 years they must have had intercourse but never complete[ly], but in the air raid, in the heat of the terror, I was created."

"[On mortality] If you are a Jew, and I am, it is not a subject that is ever far away. The Holocaust, in which I lost no one I knew, scarred me forever. And my life is informed by knowledge of it. I'm a jolly little soul but at the back of the jollity there is a knowledge of despair."

"[On the TV series Miriam's Big Fat Adventure] I've always been fat and you're not supposed to be fat, so my built-in rebellion starts with the very flesh that I inhabit."

"The umbilical cord was never completely cut, metaphorically speaking, so I still feel massively connected to them long after their deaths. But I also happen to think that being an only child is inevitably damaging in some way because it too intensely focuses you on your parents and deprives young people of the socialising they must experience in order to fruit properly. I was terribly anxious to make friends; and I'm still needing people rather more than I should be, even at this advanced age."

"Nobody thinks they've had the career they deserve. And I want to be as important as Judi and Maggie and all the others, you know. And I think I'm bloody good — but nobody else agrees with me."

"I now regret it because it caused the person I loved the most pain she could not bear. I should have been aware that to tell her was very wrong. It also hurts me that she was not then able to live to see my success."

"I was in my late twenties when I told my mother. [...] I spoke to her about an affair with a woman and three days later she had this stroke."

"Germaine Greer first impinged on my own life in my final year as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. We women students were all gathered together in the college hall for the annual Founder's Day Feast, and as we finished eating, the principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian voice reverberating round the room. At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression."

"So we are to have a dissolution! I think it would be a good thing for Liberalism if we got a good beating this time and had time to form a policy in opposition. The next question which the party must stand upon must be the Dis-establishment of the Church. The Ritualists have convinced me of its necessity. I can't abide paying money to make England Papist. But don't think me a Bismarck-man, as I am sorry to find Bryce is. I am still an "old Radical," and a worshipper of "Joe Hume.""

"Of course in calling Cromwell a "tyrant" I used the word in its strict sense; and in that sense I don't think he is fairly a "tyrant" till he dissolves the 1654 Parliament. My notion of his character is, I am afraid, a new one... Cromwell seems to me neither the ambitious hypocrite nor the "governing genius" which people on one side or the other try to make him out, but a very right-meaning and able man who got with quite honest intentions into a false position and had not political genius enough to clear out of it. Of administrative genius he had plenty of course. All his later story seems to me very pathetic and mournful in the revolt he shows at his position of tyrant, and yet his inability to free himself from it."

"I am very wretched, really wretched, about Gladstone's retirement. I can't follow him everywhither, but he is my leader, and I don't see any other to lead me on the Liberal benches. And I am cast down by the general ingratitude. Everybody I meet (save the Holy Roman) seems glad he is gone. It makes me want to carry out my notion of writing a history from 1815 to now, if only to say that I for one love and honour Gladstone as I love and honour no other living statesman."

"So prodigious has been the store of original documents, charters, rolls, dispatches, memoirs which have of late been disinterred from the archives of the past, that history has retrograded into annals."

"As you see in my own Wee-Book, I think moral and intellectual facts as much facts for the historian as military or political facts."

"Last night I met Gladstone—it will always be a memorable night to me; Stubbs was there, and Goldwin Smith and Humphrey Sandwith and Mackenzie Wallace whose great book on Russia is making such a stir, besides a few other nice people; but one forgets everything in Gladstone himself, in his perfect naturalness and grace of manner, his charming abandon of conversation, his unaffected modesty, his warm ardour for all that is noble and good. I felt so proud of my leader—the chief I have always clung to through good report and ill report—because, wise or unwise as he might seem in this or that, he was always noble of soul. He was very pleasant to me, and talked of the new historic school he hoped we were building up as enlisting his warmest sympathy. I wish you could have seen with what a glow he spoke of the Montenegrins and their struggle for freedom; how he called on us who wrote history to write what we could of that long fight for liberty! And all through the evening not a word to recall his greatness amongst us, simple, natural, an equal among his equals, listening to every one, drawing out every one, with a force and a modesty that touched us more than all his power."

"I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the "humanitarianism" of Gladstone than in the purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies of peoples with peoples, the sense of a common humanity between nations, the aspirations of nationalities after freedom and independence, are real political forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them as forces, and Disraeli disowns them that the one has been on the right side, and the other on the wrong in parallel questions such as the upbuilding of Germany or Italy. I think it will be so in this upbuilding of the Sclave."

"The fact is I am a little puzzled with "Liberals" who go in for enslaving Lorraine and turning Elsass, as Bismarck puts it, into a "German Venetia." It is not a question of loving France or loving Germany. It is a question of falling back on the platform of the Treaty of Vienna and dealing with peoples as if they were cyphers. Your indifference to the will of the people themselves is of the old Tory and Metternich order. I never yet met a French provincial to whom France was not more than his own province. In Normandy, for instance, you never could get a Norman to see things in your way. Alsatians I meet now every day at Sydenham; they speak German, but they are French to the core. There can be no question about the Lorrainers. The truth is you care a good deal for freedom in the past,—but in the present you hate France more than you love liberty."

"A brilliant essay, pays particular attention to social conditions. Contains notable character sketches of Tudor monarchs and statesmen."

"The really notable thing about the elections is the political "cleavage" they denote. It will be an ill day when, as in France, our political lines of division coincide with our social and religious lines. Yet that is what this election points to. Liberalism is becoming more and more coincident with Nonconformity; it is becoming less and less common among men of the higher social class. The bulk of the nobles and the gentry, almost all the parsons, the bulk of the lawyers, I fear an increasing number of doctors, are all Conservative. I see that Liberals have an intellectual work to do as well as a directly political. I mean that they must convert the upper classes as well as organise the lower. And this perhaps may force on us soon a higher and a more intelligent Liberalism than we have now."

"Whether Gladstone takes office or no let us never forget that the triumph is his. He and he only among the Liberals I met or heard of never despaired. He and he only foresaw what the verdict on this "great trial" would be. When folk talk of "cool-headed statesmen" and "sentimental rhetoricians" again I shall always call to mind that in taking stock of English opinion at this crisis the "sentimental rhetorician" was right and the cool-headed statesmen were wrong. It is just as with political sentiment itself. The Tories hate it, and the Whigs scorn it; and yet the great force which has transformed Europe, which has been the secret of its history ever since 1815, is a political "sentiment"—that of Nationality."

"I shall never be content till I have superseded Hume, and I believe I shall supersede him—not because I am so good a writer, but because, being an adequate writer, I have a larger and grander conception than he had of the organic life of a nation as a whole."

"As a mere literary monument, the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue. Its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language. But for the moment its literary effect was less than its social. The power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, or Milton, or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago."

"No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was as yet the one English book which was familiar to every Englishman; it was read at churches and read at home, and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm."

"The whole moral effect which is produced now-a-days by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone. And its effect in this way, however dispassionately we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class. Literature reflected the general tendency of the time; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety, which still crowd our older libraries, drove before them the classical translations and Italian novelettes of the age of Elizabeth. "Theology rules there," said Grotius of England, only ten years after the Queen's death; and when Casaubon, the last of the great scholars of the sixteenth century, was invited to England by King James, he found both King and people indifferent to letters. "There is a great abundance of theologians in England," he says to a friend; "all point their studies in that direction.""

"The attraction of the earlier [Anglo-Saxon] period lay, as Green saw, not in its dynastic or political affairs but in its essentially colonial character. The central protagonist was the English people engaged in settling their land. It was in fact a multiple protagonist: the controlling theme was the gradual expansion, convergence and coalescence of the small coastal pockets of settlement; the initial obstacle to a comprehensive settlement, and the achievement of a national political life as "England", was not so much the conquered Britons, though they fought hard, as the untamed land itself. It is not at all hard to appreciate the appeal of this... [F]or Green...the attraction of the earliest period of English history lay in the vicarious experience it offered of the free self-reliance and co-operation, the awe-inspiring isolation, and the heroic confrontation of man and virgin nature, of a colonial, frontier society... [I]t was Green who above all gave colour and imagnative depth and intensity to the English experience as, initially, a colonising one."

"As in the modern instance of Hungary, the part which the Parliament was to play in the period which followed Cromwell's fall shows the importance of clinging to the forms of constitutional freedom, even when their life seems lost. In the inevitable reaction against tyranny they afford centres for the reviving energies of the people. It is of hardly less importance that the tide of liberty, when it again returns, is enabled through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally along its traditional channels."

"[I]n spite of all the Gairdners and "Rollsmen" I shall go on loving freedom and the men who won it for us to the end of the chapter. In an offshoot of the Times yesterday I saw some remarks of Bismarck on "despatches" and "State papers," which the Ranke school might weigh to their great profit. He looks on such materials as of very little value. "What," he asks, "would all the current despatches tell of my real policy or that of Gladstone or Thiers"? Surely they tell even less of national feeling, of those impulses which (and not the policy of statesmen) really—with my Lord Beaconsfield's and Ranke's good leave—make history."

"The prime cause of Green's popularity and influence was his originality and it is the measure of his achievement that we are now in danger of forgetting this. He reconstructed in a single volume the development of a nation, taking cognizance not only of the political but also of the social, the cultural and the religious aspects of its life. His whole method was startlingly novel when he wrote; and it may be remarked that no one has since accomplished on the same scale the same task for this or, indeed, for any other nation. When Green found it necessary to remark: "As you see in my own Wee Book, I think moral and intellectual facts as much facts for the historian as military facts," he uttered what has now become a truism. The doctrine was of course not new, but Green was the first resolutely to apply it to the general history of a great nation."

"What one really sees on the Continent, if one likes to learn from their statesmen and journals instead of from the chatter of table d'hôtes, is the immense influence for good which England is just now wielding. I see Mr. Fish tells Spain to compare England's colonial policy with her own if she wants to know how to manage a colony. So in Germany "English Constitutionalism" is getting too hard even for Bismarck, as his remarkable speech about ministerial responsibility showed. It was the argument from England alone which he cared to answer. So here the influence of France seems to have faded away,—it is English order, English justice, English self-government that Italians are talking about as a model for their own."

"I won't divide by Kings, a system whereby History is made Tory unawares and infants are made to hate History."

"Mr. Howard talked politics and told me the passage at the close of Carlyle's letter meant a plan of Lord Beaconsfield for at once occupying Constantinople! I am afraid we are drifting into war—into war on the side of the Devil and in the cause of Hell. It will be so terrible to have to wish England beaten. People are all shy now of saying in the old-fashioned way that they love their country. Well I am not ashamed to say it. I love England dearly. But I love her too well to wish her triumphant if she fight against human right and human freedom. Pitt longed for her defeat in America, but it killed him when it came. I can understand that double feeling now."