Academics From England

"You have deliberately tasted two worms and you can leave Oxford by the town drain."

"The model of a modern Prime Minister would be a kind of grotesque composite freak—someone with the dedication to duty of a Peel, the physical energy of a Gladstone, the detachment of a Salisbury, the brains of an Asquith, the balls of a Lloyd George, the word-power of a Churchill, the administrative gifts of an Attlee, the style of a Macmillan, the managerialism of a Heath, and the sleep requirements of a Thatcher. Human beings do not come like that."

"Is the bean dizzy?"

"You were fighting a liar in the quadrangle."

"Someone is occupewing my pie. Please sew me to another sheet."

"A blushing crow."

"A well-boiled icicle."

"You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain."

"Her late husband, you know, a very sad death—eaten by missionaries—poor soul!"

"You will find as you grow older that the weight of rages will press harder and harder upon the employer."

"Kinquering Congs their titles take."

"To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery."

"Churton Collins ... was certainly not the man to grow enthusiastic over every " new thing " that might might loom above the literary horizon. He more often confronted novelty from the peak of than of . Yet it was Churton Collins who alligned with Dante and Milton, and declared that " no poet has made his début with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.""

"Three cheers for our queer old dean!"

"Is it kisstomary to cuss the bride?"

"Quem Jupiter vult perdere, dementat prius."

"The Lord is a shoving leopard."

"Too solemn for day, too sweet for night, Come not in darkness, come not in light; But come in some twilight interim, When the gloom is soft, and the light is dim."

"-spots, Aye bright with spiritual sunshine."

"It is a known circumstance that when, at six years old, the tailor came to measure him for his first suit, he was sent into what was called Sidney’s little study, a small quiet room he much favoured; and on the man stating his errand, and his mother repeating it, Sidney said, “I am reading, come and tell me about this line; I cannot tell quite what Milton means here.” To which the man replied, “I know nothing about books, Sir, I am come to take your measure for your new clothes;” and poor Sidney was obliged to put down his Milton, saying, in his always sweet manner when a child “I am so sorry you do not know about such books, they would make you so happy.”"

"But if the electorate said a firm "No" to the Conservatives on Thursday, the enthusiasm for Labour was muted. The party won just 35 per cent of the vote, less than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and less than Tony Blair achieved in his three election victories. Indeed, never before has a party been able to form a majority government on so low a share of the vote. In combination with the Conservatives' record low share, this meant that the share of the vote won by Labour and the Conservatives combined was the lowest since Labour first became the Conservatives' principal rivals in 1922."

"[T]o some degree I'm a jester, a licensed fool; under the guise of impartiality or academic dottiness, you're given a licence to say what other people won't say. I take the view that intellectuals tend not to be very good at politics. You need to be articulate, you need to be good at communication, you need to be able to construct a narrative and set out a vision; but you also need not to have self-doubt – and that's a crucial feature of academic life."

"The life-work of Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College for over thirty years, and Oxford Professor of Poetry, was to rediscover and re-create the history and literature of the Ancient Classical world. Though he became a scholar of international standing, he was never a pure scholar in the strict sense. He does not belong to the crystalline limbo of Scaliger or Bentley or Housman. His purpose was missionary: to reconvert a modern audience and readership for whom the urbane tradition of classical learning—in fact the whole august zodiac of classical reference—has come to seem deeply alien, if not actually menacing in its humped posture of intellectual introversion. But the whole tenor of Bowra's writing was extrovert."

"Without you, Heaven would be too dull to bear, And Hell would not be Hell if you are there."

"Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was inconceivably bloody — nobody who wasn't there can ever imagine what it was like."

"Buggers can't be choosers"

"Though I knew very well that I had nothing like Denniston's linguistic equipment for the study of Greek, I agreed with him about its purpose. The task of a Greek scholar, we both thought, was to revive as best he could for the modern world the inner life of the Greeks by a close examination of their literature."

"Can't help you. Pity. Slept with him once—should have asked him then."

"Where there's death, there's hope."

"I don't know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I, at least, am known by my face."

"Buggery was invented to fill that awkward hour between evensong and cocktails."

"I'm a man more dined against than dining."

"Splendid couple—slept with both of them."

"Though like Our Lord and Socrates he does not publish much, he thinks and says a great deal and has had an enormous influence on our times"

"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’.”"

"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)."

"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."

"“… 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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Love that fills the firmament with glory!— All the world knew this, but now I know it; Last have proved the eternal story And in song will shew it, All to gain, if you shall deign Me to be your poet.O divinest Heavenly Aphrodite, Here on earth incarnate I behold you, Lovelier, more serene and mighty Than my lips have told you, Far beyond my dreamings fond In my arms to fold you.You it was knew where the sweet flowers haunted; I could praise them found, but you could find them; I with studious art unvaunted Have in garlands twined them, And as due bring here to you On your brows to bind them.Take the worship, and with grace in guerdon Still for me new flower-abodes discover, That my song may keep its burden, There is nought above her; I, denied her breast, abide Her devoutest lover."

"June with her glancing grasses, June with a smiling sky, June, brown as the country lasses Or wings of the dragon-fly!The mown hay lies like sedges Or weed of the seashore strewn; Abrim with corn to the hedges The fields are filled in June."

"'Einstein is completely cuckoo'. That is how the cocky young Robert Oppenheimer described the world's most famous scientist in early 1935, after visiting him in Princeton. ... Einstein had been trying for a decade to develop an ambitious new theory in ways that demonstrated, in the view of Oppenheimer and others, that the sage of Princeton had lost the plot. Einstein was virtually ignoring matter on the smallest scale, using quantum theory. He was seeking an ambitious new theory, not in response to puzzling experimental discoveries, but as an intellectual exercise—using only his imagination, underpinned by mathematics. Although this approach was unpopular among his peers, he was pioneering a method similar to what some of his most distinguished successors are now using successfully at the frontiers of research."

"A physicist friend of mine once had a terrible spate of misfortune. Her flat was burgled, her cat was run over, and her grandfather died, all in the same week. Needing a bit of TLC, she went to see her professor, who offered three words of advice: “Do some physics.” For most people who are in need of consolation, I suspect physics is among the last things they would consider. , a former ' science editor, wants to persuade them that the branch of science so many people find soulless and intimating can offer much spiritual balm. He makes his case in what he calls a “love letter to physics”. ... For me, the main joy of physics is that it puts human beings so firmly in our place. Even if all of us – and every other living thing – died tomorrow, every quantum in the universe would carry on obliviously, doing its eternal, orderly dance to fundamental laws that we shall probably never discover. If you’re not a scientist, that thought may not be very consoling. But I’m just happy to keep on doing some physics."

"‘The greatest living theoretical physicist’ – many commentators in the past few decades have described Steven Weinberg in such terms. When I rather cheekily asked him what he thought of that statement, he shot back: ‘It is quite ridiculous to rank scientists like that’, adding with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but it would be impolite to dispute the conclusion’. That reply was classic Weinberg: self-aware, intimidatingly direct but always ready to lighten the moment with humour."

"... One of the most vocal skeptics is the Standard-Model pioneer Martin Veltman: 'String theory is mumbo jumbo. It has nothing to do with experiment.'... But is clear from the comments that Dirac repeatedly made in his lectures on the way theoretical physics should be done that he would have disagreed with those criticisms: he would have counselled string theorists to let the theory's beauty lead them by the hand, not to worry about the lack of experimental support and not be deterred if a few observations appear to refute it. But he would have cautioned string theorists to be modest, to keep an open mind and never to assume that they are within sight of the end of fundamental physics. If past experience is anything to go by, another revolution will eventually follow. Such was the advice of this extraordinarily unemotional man offered to his colleagues: be guided, above all, by your emotions."

"The World does not now contain Annals of more indisputable Antiquity than those delivered down by the ancient Bramins."

"As every physicist knows, Dirac was, in the words of Niels Bohr, "the strangest man of quantum mechanics" — someone deeply private, of very, very few words, rectilinear in thinking, virtually, apparently devoid of empathy with other human beings, always an outsider."