University Of Cambridge Alumni

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"As you fail, knowing you're not supposed to panic—panicking will drain your strength—your mind pulls away as it does so easily…You slip through Sasha's open window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small gold pagoda, a pair of red dice. Her harp in one corner with its small wood stool. She’s asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets. You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I believe in you and I'll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!"

"Mom makes sculptures in the desert out of trash and our old toys. Eventually her sculptures fall apart, which is “part of the process.”"

"Stephanie and Bennie had lived in Crandale a year before they were invited to a party. It wasn't a place that warmed easily to strangers…It wore on Stephanie more than she'd expected, dropping off Chris for kindergarten, waving or smiling at some blond mother releasing blond progeny from her SUV or Hummer, and getting back a pinched, quizzical smile whose translation seemed to be: Who are you again? How could they not know, after months of daily mutual sightings? They were snobs or idiots or both, Stephanie told herself, yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness."

"At last he found Rebecca, smiling, holding Cara-Ann in her arms. She was dancing. They were too far away for Alex to reach them, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that would keep him from ever again touching the delicate silk of Rebecca's eyelids, or feeling, through his daughter's ribs, the scramble of her heartbeat. Without the zoom, he couldn't even see them. In desperation, he T'd Rebecca, pls wAt 4me, my bUtiful wyf, then kept his zoom trained on her face until he saw her register the vibration, pause in her dancing, and reach for it."

"Entering Lulu's bedroom, Dolly felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz: everything was in color. A pink shade encircled the overhead lamp. Pink gauzy fabric hung from the ceiling. Pink winged princesses were stenciled onto the walls: Dolly had learned how to make the stencils in a jailhouse art class and had spent days decorating the room while Lulu was at school. Long strings of pink beads hung from the ceiling. When she was home, Lulu emerged from her room only to eat."

"I can't tell if [Alice’s] actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real."

"I looked down at the city. Its extravagance felt wasteful, like gushing oil or some other precious thing Bennie was hoarding for himself, using it up so no one else could get any. I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you."

"All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if she'd been gouged""

"[Coz] was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she'd lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child's striped scarf…Sasha no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn't tempt her. Only from people."

"The shame memories began early that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting, while he listened to one of his senior executives make a case for pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band Bennie had signed to a three-record deal a couple of years back""

"It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now: Where was that place with the bathtub? Who was that girl?”"

"For months she'd done business with Lars, arriving sometimes without having managed to take anything, just needing money. "I thought he was my boyfriend," she said. "But I think I wasn't thinking anymore." She was better now, hadn't stolen anything in two years. "That wasn't me, in Naples," she told you, looking out at the crowded bar. "I don't know who it was. I feel sorry for her.""

"Bennie's assistant, Sasha, brought him coffee: cream and two sugars. He shimmied a tiny red enameled box from his pocket, popped the tricky latch, pinched a few gold flakes between his trembling fingers, and released them into his cup. He'd begun this regimen two months ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency. Bennie's goal was more basic than potency: sex drive, his own having mysteriously expired."

""Women are cunts," his father says. "That's why.” "They are not—" He can't make himself repeat the word. "They are," Lou says tightly. "Pretty soon you'll know it for sure." Rolph turns away from his father. There is nowhere to go, so he jumps into the sea and begins slowly paddling back toward shore. The sun is low, the water choppy and full of shadows. Rolph imagines sharks just under his feet, but he doesn't turn or look back."

"We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back?"

"She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well”"

"Every night, my mother ticks off another day I've been clean. It's more than a year, my longest yet. "Jocelyn, You've got so much life in front of you," she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, there's a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room."

"This also shows that Smith is not as great an imperialist as he is occasionally made out to be. In fact, on close reading, it is impossible to characterise Elphinstone and Smith as imperialist and anti-India historians. This cannot be said about E J Rapson, a Cambridge University Sanskrit professor, the editor of the ancient Indian history volume in the Cambridge History of India series, and the author of brief book, Ancient India, meant for the Indian Civil Service candidates. To Rapson there never was any originality in ancient Indian history, which was also a collection of histories of many separate countries. It is against characters like Rapson that Indian scholars of ancient India wielded their pens."

"Their oldest literature supplies no certain indication that they still retained the recollection of their former home; and we may reasonably conclude therefore that the invasion which brought them into India took place at a date considerably earlier."

"What seems to have happened is that the seminar room has taken on a life of its own; that topics are established and debated, regardless of any empirical reality. And that hypotheses evolve through a type of arms race; each one has to be more bizarre than the last to attract attention. The larger the constituency, and English literature is the largest of all, the more like an ants’ nest the competition. Only the weirdest survive. Similarly with linguistics; perhaps less than a twentieth of all linguists do anything that could really be described as empirical investigation and tiny fraction of that pays attention to little-known languages."

"Arunachal Pradesh should be treated as a major priority on a global scale. Languages such as Basque and Burushaski have attracted high levels of scholarly interest over many decades precisely because of their status as language isolates. Those in Arunachal Pradesh have been completely bypassed. Moreover, although these languages are presently still spoken, their populations are small and pressure to switch to Hindi, promoted in both the media and via the school system, is growing. Probably by no coincidence, Arunachal Pradesh is also a major centre for biodiversity, something which attracts worldwide attention and resources. It is suggested that the little-known languages of Arunachal Pradesh should be given similar priority due to their uniqueness and endangered status."

"Arunachal Pradesh consists of a chain of isolated languages, which have been on the southern edge of the core Tibeto-Burman area. A plethora of different contact situations have allowed both lexical borrowing and sometimes striking grammatical and phonological restructuring. But perhaps it would be useful to begin considering this region as more similar to the Amazon or NE Asia than Tibet."

"The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document, and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically, but it is nevertheless firmly established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology."

"As T. Burrow puts it in his book The Sanskrit Language (Delhi ed. 2001: Motilal Banarsidass, p.4): The relations between the ancient Iranian and the language of the Vedas is so close that it is not possible satisfactorily to study one without the other. Grammatically the differences are very small; the chief differentiation in the earliest period lies in certain characteristic and well-defined phonetic changes which have affected Iranian on the one hand and Indo-Iranian on the other. It is quite possible to find verses in the oldest portion of the Avesta, which simply by phonetic substitutions according to established laws can be turned into intelligible Sanskrit. The greater part of the vocabulary is held in common and a large list could be provided of the words shared between the two which are absent from the rest of the Indo-European."

"We would be failing to fulfil our obligations were we not to offer sanctuary. Having intervened so recently and extensively in Iraq, we have, even more than other countries, a moral duty in the UK."

"Burrow, whose The Sanskrit Language (1973) is still the authority in this field, says: "Vedic is a language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-European than any other member of the family" (34); he also states that root nouns, "very much in decline in the earliest recorded Indo-European languages", are preserved better in Sanskrit, and later adds, "Chiefly owing to its antiquity the Sanskrit language is more readily analysable, and its roots more easily separable from accretionary elements than… any other IE language" (123, 289)."

"It is now generally agreed by most authorities on the subject that the Aryan linguistic vestiges in the Near East are to be connected specifically with Indo- Aryan, and not with the Iranian, and also that they do not represent a third, independent group, and are not to be ahscribed to the hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Aryan."

"The Aryans appear in Mitanni from 1500 BC as the ruling dynasty, which means that they must have entered the country as conquerors."

"In addition, in his The Sanskrit Language T. Burrow finds a few traces of the Sanskrit language among the documents of the Kassite dynasty of Babylon: “In a list of names of gods with Babylonian equivalents we find a sun-god Suriyas (rendered Samas) which must clearly be identified with Skt Surya. In addition, Maruttas the war-god (rendered En-Urta) has been compared with Skt Marut … Among the kings of this dynasty one has a name which can be interpreted as Aryan: Abhirattas: abhi-ratha – ‘facing chariots in battle’.”"

"The geographical horizon of the Avesta is almost exclusively eastern Iranian, but it does have some references which indicate the presence of Proto Indoaryans in northern central Iran, bringing them within striking distance of the Near East. These are the references which occur from time to time in the Avesta to the Mazanian daevas. The adjective in question (mdzainya-) is derived from *mdzana-, the name of a coun try which happens not to occur as such in the Avesta, but whose location is indicated by the fact that it has always been known to be connected with the country later known as Mazandaran, i.e. the territory between the southern shore of the Caspian sea and the Alburz mountain range. In the later tradition this figures prominently as a region hostile to the Iranians and as a notorious home of Devs. The presence of daevas in Mazana indicates the presence of daeva-worshippers, and since we have seen that the daeva-worshippers were the Proto-Indoaryans, we can conclude that the Avestan references to Mazanian daevas indicate their presence also in this region."

"“… in the case of Indo-European it is certain that there was no such unitary language which can be reached by means of comparison. It woul be easy to produce, more or less ad infinitum [,] a list of forms like Skt nabhi-, Gk omphalos ‘navel’, which although inherited directly from the primitive IE period, and radically related [,] are irreducible to a single original. In fact detailed comparison makes it clear that the Indo- European that we can reach by this means was already deeply split up into a series of varying dialects.”"

"The contact of two races so dissimilar in character, in culture and in institutions as the English and the Indian raises the problem of the contact of cultures in its most acute form. Mutual influence is easiest when two cultures are basically the same; radical difference tends either to mutual repulsion, or to absorption of one by the other. (Spear 1963:126)"

"I was in Chile shortly after Allende came to power, and predicted the economic ruin to which his regime reduced the country. That, coupled with the recent escalation in the arming of extreme left-wing para-military groups, seemed to make at least a temporary military take-over inevitable sooner or later, if all-out civil war was to be averted. The activities of Señor Corvalán's Communist Party, sub rosa, indeed bore a large responsibility for the chaos and generation of hatreds which led to the present intervention by the military. Equally...Chile is now in a "kind of civil war", and therefore draconian measures (of brief duration, one hopes) by the new regime have to be expected."

"Above all, what was most lacking on the French side was the will to fight. The memories of the 1,500,000 dead of the First World War, the sapping effects of the Front Populaire, the unhelpfulness of Britain as a military partner in the interwar years (even by September 1939 four divisions were all she could send to France), appeasement, Hitler's bloodless victories and the appallingly swift smashing-up of Poland had all left their mark, as had the lethargy of the months of the "phoney war"."

"Mr Horne's book, recounting events in Germany since 1952, fills an important gap, for there is an obvious danger in discussing Germany's future always in terms of her past. This is journalism at its best, in the tradition of the great foreign correspondents of the 1930s, not pretending to be history but retelling, with all the liveliness of the born reporter and without prejudice, as remarkable a story as any in the post-war decade. If ever a book was topical, this one is: here is the background to the Geneva talks in their most important sector."

"Alistair Horne has written a brilliant reportage-narrative history, highly compressed, using sources mainly hostile to the Commune, and rarely quoting any official publications of the Commune or the memoirs of the survivors. Yet it pulsates with deep feeling and conveys the mood of the time. Its rich illustrations are a boon for the reader. Ideological issues are dismissed, and events are seen as a deep human tragedy."

"It is not in South-east Asia, the Middle East or Africa that the ideological battle of the seventies seems likely to be waged, but in South America. Here, one feels, may well be the battleground where the orthodoxy of Soviet communism will triumph definitively over Maoism, or vice versa."

"But what really matters is...the question: "How many divisions does the Pope have?" In Chile it has been the concentrated fire power of the "divisions" of militant trade unionists that has enabled Allende to carry through his revolutionary programme (thereby, incidentally, bringing the economy to ruin and the country to the verge of civil war). And, in the British context of, say, 1980, on whose side could one count the comparable trade union "divisions"? With the "Lib-Labs" or the "Soc-Labs"?"

"Occasionally an epic subject encounters a fine historian. This the the case with the Algerian war and Mr Horne. The result is a book of compelling power, written with compassion and understanding."

"When Sir Keir rightly attacked anti-Semitism in his party, he did not analyse its nature clearly enough. It is not like the old Right-wing anti-Semitism which regarded Jews as creepy foreigners. Rather it a lethally political cocktail of two things – whites on the hard Left who hate anything white, Western or British, and Islamists who, for pseudo-religious reasons, see Jews as the eternal enemy and imagine Allah is telling them to take Palestine by slaughter."

"Labour insiders are more aware than most voters of the danger of the weird alliance between punitive Muslim extremists who believe women are inferior, homosexuals should be killed etc and the usually white hard-left Corbynites whose social agenda is completely different but share Islamist hatred of Israel and the West."

"They make excellent life-partners. No doubt some old bigots will claim that marriage is a uniquely human institution, but it won't take long to find enlightened vicars who believe that human and canine dignity is in a very real sense enhanced by recognising inter-species unions."

"People are often silly in their attacks on these things. Elites are inevitable and have some good qualities. Any old society will and should have an establishment. Yet a mark of greatness in politics is a capacity to transcend these elites – witness Churchill, who was born into one, and Thatcher, who was not. Jenkins did not do this. Unlike his wife, says Campbell, he was "handicapped by the wish to please'". He most wished to please the grandees who fitted his rather definition of the word "civilised"."

"One of the best written on the whole Algerian drama."

"Mr Charles Moore announced he will be stepping down in April after six years as editor [of The Spectator], during which time the magazine's circulation doubled to 37,000 and advertising revenue increased tenfold."

"It is clear that Horne's own political sympathies lie on the middle ground of rational reform and cooperation, none the less valuable for the fact, that, as the struggle in Algeria grew in ferocity, the centre began to vanish from sight."