Journalists From England

"Usually dismissive of other female writers, Riding had praised Stein in the final chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry for using a language of divine ordinariness. It was 's idea that they should invite Miss Stein to publish something with the ."

"In 1928 Edmund Blunden's ' was widely praised for its lyrical, approach. Sassoon's ', also published in 1928, set the scene for the contrast between an idyllic, pre-war world and the savagery of war explored in his ."

"For many of us who continue to aspire to the highest standards of journalism, Anna Politkovskaya will remain a beacon burning bright, a yardstick by which integrity, courage and commitment will be measured. Those who met her over the years can testify that she never allowed her feet to leave the ground, never basked in fame or celebrity. She remained modest and unassuming to the end."

"By 2002, Putin was taking full advantage of the Bush-Blair 'war on terror' as cover for Moscow's wholesale crackdown in Chechnya. Anna became increasingly isolated. She reported the extra-judicial killings, kidnappings, rapes, torture and dissapearances that characterised the Russian forces' methods as they struggled to contain the Chechen War, and she often reported these alone. Increasingly Anna felt, and wrote publicly, that Putin's policies actively nurtured the very terrorists they were supposedly designed to defeat. Threaded through these accounts is her deep conviction that Putin's path to the presidency was shaped around, and dependent upon, his pursuit of the Chechen conflict. She even links some of the specific torture practices that she uncovers in Chechnya to those extolled by the KGB and its successor the FSB in their training manuals."

"Eccentricity has not always been encouraged by the prim editors of . Invited to list his recreations, omitted motorbikes and wrote instead: , and tennis. Identifying himself as of provided a greater source of satisfaction."

"As I read A Russian Diary I wondered what on earth we have embassies in Russia for. How did it happen that our leaders so steadfastly ignored what they knew Putin was up to? Was it the hunger for gas? For the riches of the outrageous post-Communist sell-off of Russian state assets and manufacturing resources, through which our financial institutions participated in the rise of the thieving oligarchs? Or was it the blind desire to keep Russia 'on side', whatever the cost to her own impoverished people?"

"She had an intellect masculine in its range and detachment—a type of intellect possessed by some women in all ages, not, as they are apt to suppose it, the peculiar possession of modern women."

"I must confess that I finished reading A Russian Diary feeling that it should be taken up and dropped from the air in vast quantities throughout the length and breadth of Mother Russia, for all her people to read."

"The , constructed from rosy bricks and crowned with curved stone s, stands among the meadows flanking the , in the middle of England, a hundred s to the north of London. Starting life as a modest built in the , it was enlarged twice. An ambitious owner redesigned it in the , to incorporate a large carved staircase and a grand reception room on an upper floor. In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a library and a lake. The estate, easily encompassed by an hour's brisk walk, is surprisingly varied in its landscape, incorporating traces of an and a trading post."

"Reading Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary in the knowledge of her terrible end – at the hands of an assassin in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block – it seems to foretell that she could not possibly be allowed to live."

"He’s got tired of her now, has Martin. He said she took so much worshipping she made his knees sore."

"Science has wonders far transcending those of superstition, and they are poor philosophers who try to bring Nature down to the level of their small capacities instead of striving to exalt those capacities to the height of creation's truth. No savage, worshipping the most preposterous idol, ever believed greater absurdities than a modern sceptic, who makes his small modicum of reason the standard by which to measure the boundless universe."

"Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the , about the pleasure of food and wine, or — in contrast — about the overstuffed house of a solid Jewish family in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. A short paragraph of hers can expand in the reader's mind into a hinterland of suggestion and sensation. However does she do it? She says in Quicksands that she took a lesson from Ernest Hemingway's remark that "all you have to do is to write one true sentence, and then go on from there"."

"' ... had been earning its advance, and Aldous was being paid royalties. The book sold 2,500 copies in the first year and 86 the year after. (', Scott Fitzgerald's first novel published the year before, sold forty-five thousand.) Cash in hand, Aldous enrolled Suzanne in an art course he had seen advertised in '."

"No writer played less to the gallery. Often shy, she could nevertheless tell marvellously funny stories about Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton or the fastidious Huxleys in India, offered a meal of chocolates, ice cream, dumplings stuffed with curried mice. One remembers a sturdy, trousered figure, bright blue eyes, effective and observant, the clipped voice quickening at an ungenerous remark or deference to some fashionable fraud. Always she treasured "that sense of lighter heart, deep-grooved pleasures, daylight and proportion". Her memoir, Quicksands (2005), revived interest in the writer, and her elegant, insightful work."

"It’s possible, these days, to think of E. M. Forster's cultural role as the providing of stories for to make into pretty movies. For people who think that way, Nicola Beauman's new biography will be a useful corrective. Here, in a book of modest length (at last, a biography that is not longer than its subject's collected works!), is what every general reader should know about Forster's life and contacts."

"The were delighted to accept a new god, but reluctant to relinquish many of the old ones."

"was always to attribute depression to ill-health or, when she was much older, to the prevailing east wind. She never assumed it was a facet of her temperament or that her life could reasonably cause it."

"The descendants of the sleeping on the pavements of are paupers. We speak of poverty as being abject, extreme, dire, genteel; crippling, unmitigated, relative. It can be all of these, but it is always the last."

"'s letters to Ray give a very good idea of her literary influences. These were definitely not her mother's her favorites (Hardy, ', Gissing) and Elizabeth has grown out of Dostoevsky, dislikes Dickens, finds Lawrence a 'bloody crosspatch' and thinks Katherine Mansfield moaned too much. 'It is easy to see who is behind me: Jane Austen & Chekhov & EM Forster & Virginia Woolf. ...' ... Other important writers for her were Sterne (for his relationship to the reader), Richardson and Fielding. Above all she revered Jane Austen and Turgenev."

"If an entity is to be considered as a scientific entity we must be able to say what would enable us to detect it. This is the basis of Einstein's objection to Newton's . There are no physical operations, according to Einstein, which enable us to distinguish absolute space. As regards absolute time, Newton himself confessed that there may be no natural processes which enable us to measure it. We can never, in the nature of things, say whether we are dealing with absolute time or not. Both these entities, therefore, are described by Einstein as metaphysical, with no real place in science."

"Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and...there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts...Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is is that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with."

"Galileo approached the modern scientific outlook more nearly than did Kepler. Like Kepler, he believed that Nature lent itself to mathematical description, but he does not seem to have regarded the fulfillment of mathematical relations as the cause of phenomena. He regarded mathematics rather as the one and only true key that would introduce order and coherence into our sense impressions."

"An adolescent act of defiance has now become a familiar form of virtue. 'Going with the flow' has become an imperative, a clear version of the good life. Change is sentimentally evoked in popular fictions. We 'change' to move on from tragedy or difficulty, we 'change' to overcome trauma, we are frequently told to accept 'change' as some perennial fact of life, the contemplation of which brings wisdom. Virtuous change is the ethic of the soap opera and the ne plus ultra of the advice column."

"Science is not a neutral or innocent commodity which can be employed as a convenience by people wishing to partake only of the West's material power. Rather it is spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It has shown itself unable to co-exist with anything. Scientists inevitably take on the mantle of the wizards, sorcerers and witch-doctors. Their miracle cures are our spells, their experiments our rituals."

"The whole point I am making is that a hard, irreducible sense of our own self-awareness has been progressively denied us by the inroads of science both as a form and as a creator of our society."

"Butterflies attract attention and cash because they are popular and attractive, and because there are rightly seen as symbols of wildlife in decline."

"I can't say I have ever had much of a passion for proper . In fact, on about the only occasion I ever did any, I disliked the experience very much. I was about 23, and, wearying of ever finding a full-time job in , I got myself enrolled as a temporary member of staff at a northern university where I spent about four months on a cold, treeless fell, counting s. It was very boring and drove me to the bottle."

"... being rare often means your genetic resources are limited, and that makes you vulnerable to change. Small populations are also liable to be picked off by chance events, like a shrub growing up in front of you, or that new borehole for a new housing estate dug a few metres away. Conservation has recently come to the aid of many threatened plants, drawing many a little further back from the brink, but perhaps at some cost to their inherent wildness ... But the wise conservationist will aim at preventing flowers from reaching that state of extreme vulnerability in the first place."

"England is said to be one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. It has lost most of its big wild animals. A thousand years ago in my village, which was quite a big place even then, s used to build their dams on my river. Perhaps a thousand years before that the villagers might have heard a wolf howl from a distant down of a rumour of bears in the forests that extended that extended for after mile. Even a hundred years ago, there would have been far more wild flowers, particularly at the edge of the cornfields, colourful blooms whose names attest to their former familiarity: , , ."

"The oak has long been a symbol of strength and, with the growth of the Royal Navy, also patriotic pride. It once fought our naval battles and carried our cargoes, framed our houses and spanned the roofs of cathedrals and barns, fed our pigs, tanned our leather and nourished our earliest industries."

"An average produces about five s of debris per per year. The get through this mountain of raw by sheer numbers. Fungi make up about 10% of the weight of living matter () in a wood. They are the weightiest component of all, bar the trees. You would require a convoy of dump trucks to remove the fungi of just a small copse. Yet all we see of them are their scattered in autumn."

"s of hunting camps built about 9,500 years ago indicate that by that time Britain had become densely wooded. At , in the is , bones and antlers from a variety of s were uncovered, including and in abundance, wild boar, (a prehistoric wild ox), , wolf, , , fox and hedgehog."

"Scientists need to be observed and criticized more than any other members of society. I say this not just because of the horrors that might emerge from their laboratories, but also because of the necessity for making them as morally and philosophically answerable as the rest of us."

"... until his tragic end on 13th July 1834 when, in Hawaii, he fell into a trap and was crushed to death by the wild bull that it had ensnared, devoted his life to exploration. To described the adventures and extreme hardships of this adventurous young botanist, ornithologist, and, in his later trips, surveyor, is beyond our scope. He was temperamental and, though lionized on his visits to London, was inclined to be quarrelsome when the urgency of travel and exploration did not keep him occupied."

"was a doctor, a self-sacrificing man who lived and practised in not far from the . In spite of the grimy surroundings of his home, he was an ardent naturalist."

"s enabled 'sculpture', ornaments, and fountains to be produced cheaply in quantity; Felix Austin of the Artificial Stone Works, New Road, , offered a range of fountains, all designed in the best taste."

"Of the geologically younger s, the is mainly to be found in Yorkshire; , built like so many s with stone found on its own estate, is a fine example. ... ... has been used extensively in and especially Cornwall; it dictates its own forms—gritty, grainy, sparing in ornamentation but magnificently durable."

"... in 1722 was made head gardener at , the director at the time was a certain —a learned but hot-tempered and difficult man, whose reputation was soon quite eclipsed by the fame of his gardener, for in 1724 was issued the first volume of Philip Miller's ."

"... when the was formed, and at times seemed inclined to devote a preponderance of its activities towards the study of vegetables and fruit, was there to urge the merits of botany and s. For a time, too, he acted as its honorary secretary ..."

".—I once saw our almost like a field of gold when the was in full blossom. .—Although it grows so well in England and in some parts of Scotland, it is not so common everywhere, as it is here, Henry. , the great botanist, had never seen it in Sweden, his own country; and when he first saw it here in full golden blossom, he knelt down and thanked God for making anything so beautiful. Then its delicious scent, like pleasant , is very refreshing and nice, is it not? Linnæus is said to have lamented that he could not keep this beautiful plant alive in Sweden, even in a . Severe frosts even in England are apt to kill it. In many places the is used to make fires, and is cut down and kept as fuel, especially to heat bakers' ovens. Cattle also will eat it, and in some parts of Wales it is grown expressly to feed the horses during winter. .—But, Granny, how the thorns must prick the horses' mouths and throats! .—Ah, Alice, the Welsh people are wiser than you think. They cut the gorse when very young, and bruise it in a so as to break all the thorns."

"YELLOW WATER-LILY. . This beautiful water plant is familiar to all who have ever enjoyed a season of river life, or even to those who make occasional boating excursions on our rivers. It belongs to the same natural order as its more modestly attired sister the , though of a different genus. "In golden armour glorious to behold," it forms a glorious object on the surface or lake or river, and is seen more frequently seen than the White Water-Lily. The golden blossom of this species has a more powerful and not very refined smell resembling ardent spirits, hence it has the common name of Brandy-Bottle. The Greeks prepare a from the flowers."

"Ferns may be successfully cultivated either in a , a , or the open air. To accomplish this, and even to bring something of the verdure of a country lane into the close atmosphere of the city, by means of a closed or Wardian case, in which not only ferns but also some other plants will live and thrive, is perfectly easy. , the ingenious inventor, succeeded in cultivating many flowers—such as fairy roses, and even the most luxuriant tropical plants, in them. But it must be remembered that the chief object in these closed cases is to secure a moist atmosphere, and freedom from the all-pervading dirt and dust of cities. To many plants the moisture thus secured is injurious, but to nearly all ferns it is peculiarly grateful, and to them, therefore, especially, this mode of culture is chiefly applicable. In Mr. Ward's own book on the subject, he speaks of what may be done to imitate nature in the growth of ferns; how bits of natural scenery may be artificially built up, with water trickling down from elevated portions of rock, and flowing out of the fern-house in one continuous stream."

": ' A family of shrubs and trees, chiefly tropical and subtropical. Many have bitter bark; that of ' Linnaeus, a South American species, provides the quassia chips of commerce. ... of about 28 genera only Ailanthus is likely to be seen in Britain … Two or three species are now cultivated in Britain, but all except the following are exceedingly uncommon. Ailanthus is a latinized form for ailanto, the native name of ; it means 'a tree tall enough to reach the skies.'"

"At one time trees were , principally to provide fuel. Such are the famous , ... pollarded from about 1500 to 1820, when the use of became general; such, too are the numerous pollards in ."

"The structure and habits of the family or group of pigeons are so peculiar and so strikingly distinct from those of any other birds, that they demand special attention. The pigeons were formerly classed by the majority of naturalists along with the , the true poultry, and by others with the or -like birds; but more accurate observation has rendered evident the fact that they form a perfectly distinct family, distinguished from all other birds by the singular manner in which their young are nourished. Unlike the true gallinaceae—which are hatched in a very perfect state and able to follow the parent hen within a few hours after birth—the young pigeons are born in a most immature and helpless condition, and are fed with a curdy secretion, produced in the crops of the parents, the "soft food" of the pigeon-fancier. This is expressly produces at the period of hatching, for the support of the callow young."

"and possess one great recommendation as sitters, in the soft and abundant supply of downy feathers that so specially distinguish these varieties; for under no other hens do the eggs appear to maintain a higher or more constant temperature."

"Having described the breed known as the Carrier, and the varieties allied to it, we have now to consider the different kinds of s, or those that are remarkable for their powers of flight and their attachment to the home in which they have been reared and first flown. There are numerous varieties that exhibit this peculiarity, such as the Dragon, the ordinary flying , and the Skinnum, or mongrel race, between these two breeds. Among the pure breeds that can be flown good distances may be mentioned that called the . But the varieties in which this homing faculty is developed to the highest degree are unquestionably the different races of Belgian birds, which are termed in England by the general name of Antwerps, and in Belgium are known as , s, Demi Bees, &c."

"This treatise, small as it is, could hardly be regarded as complete, without directions for the manufacture of , a drink so much in fashion, that had some made yearly for her own especial benefit. , an old and quaint bee author, who printed his work entitled "," with a phonetic alphabet of his own invention, gives the exact recipe for making mead, as used by "our renowned Queen Elizabeth of happy memory;" but the taste of our race has become more refined and we should now fail to appreciate the mead brewed with and sweet-briar leaves as relished by the virgin queen ..."

"The first, and by no means the least important, consideration of every prospective poultry keeper is the situation and construction of the poultry houses and yards. It is trued that poultry may be kept almost anywhere; good specimens of s have been reared in an attic, and many very fine ones have never known there was any world beyond a small back yard in the street of a county town. These, however, are extreme cases; and success under such disadvantageous conditions can only be achieved by constant attention, extreme cleanliness, and great judgment in supplying artificially those requirements of the birds which the place of confinement does not afford. The best of all s on which to establish a poultry yard is , or sand resting on or a substratum of gravel. If the soil is clayey, or from other causes of wet, the whole should be well drained. This is essential to success, as a wet soil is more inductive than any other circumstance of cramp, , and other diseases."