Non Fiction Authors From England

"O celestial gift of divine liberality, descending from the Father of light to raise up the rational soul even to heaven. ... Undoubtedly, indeed, thou hast placed thy desirable tabernacle in books, where the Most High, the Light of light, the Book of Life, hath established thee. Here then all who ask receive, all who seek find thee, to those who knock thou openest quickly. In books cherubim expand their wings, that the soul of the student may ascend and look around from pole to pole, from the rising and the setting sun, from the north and from the sea. In them the most high and incomprehensible God Himself is contained and worshipped."

"The government of Athens, after the abolition of Monarchy, was truly democratic and, so much convulsed by those civil dissensions which are the inevitable consequences of that kind of government, that of all the Grecian states the Athenian may be the most strictly termed the seat of faction."

"Straight and swift the swallows fly To the sojourn of the sun; All the golden year is done, All the flower-time flitted by; Thro’ the boughs the witch-winds sigh; But heart’s summer is begun; Life and love at last are one; Love-lights glitter in the sky. Summer days were soon outrun With the setting of the sun; Love’s delight is never done. Let the turn-coat roses die; We are lovers, Love and I; In Love’s lips my roses lie."

"About a well-spring, in a little mead, Of tender grasses full and flow’rets fair, There sat three youngling angels as it were Their loves recounting; and for each, indeed, Her sweet face shaded, ’gainst the noonday need, A spray of green, that bound her golden hair; Whilst, in and out by turns, a frolic air The two clear colours blended at its heed.And one, after a little, thus heard I Say to her mates, ‘Lo, if by chance there lit The lovers of each one of us hereby, Should we flee hence for fear or quiet sit?’ Whereto the twain made answer, ‘Who should fly From such a fortune sure were scant of wit.’"

"No support for the entry of ‘Aryan’ populations [in India] is found in physical anthropological data (Petraglia & Allchin 2007)"

"Archreological evidence ... both in Iran and India and Pakistan...indeed it almost always lacks any clear hallmarks to establish its originators as Indo-Europeans."

"The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)"

"From early historical times forward we know that horses have been regularly imported to South Asia. We also know the Indus had a long tradition of trade with centres to the west and north. Would it be surprising therefore if horses were occasionally acquired through trade, ultimately reaching the Indus world by land or sea? This would account for the occurrence of a small number of their bones in various contexts without the need to assume their presence must necessarily be associated with profound cultural change."

"Bridget and Raymond Allchin inform us about the early phase of Mundigak I: "Some characteristic painted designs are similar to those of Kili Ghul Mohammad II [north Baluchistan] and Anj ira I [upper south Baluchistan].""

"Such "ritual hearths" are reported from the beginning of the Harappan period itself. It has been suggested that they may have been fire altars , evidence of domestic, popular and civic fire-cults of the Indo-Iranians, which are de- scribed in detail in the later Vedic literature. It may then be an indication of culture contact between an early group of Indo-Aryans and the population of the still-flourishing Indus civilization."

"The orientation of port-holes and entrances on the cist graves is frequently towards the south. [...] This demands comparison with later Indian tradition where south is the quarter of Yama. Among the grave goods, iron is almost universal, and the occasional iron spears and tridents (trisulas) suggest an association with the god Siva. The discovery in one grave of a trident with a wrought-iron buffalo fixed to the shaft is likewise suggestive, for the buffalo is also associated with Yama, and the buffalo demon was slain by the goddess Durgà, consort of Siva, with a trident. [...] The picture which we obtain from this evidence, slight as it is, is suggestive of some form of worship of Siva."

"Nomadic herdsmen form an important element of rural life in India and Pakistan today, including the old province of Harappan culture. There is every reason to suppose that they did so in Harappan times, and that they played an important part in the economy and organization of the Harappan world."

"Their [the Aryans] presence should therefore be in evidence archaeologically… But as yet it is scarcely attested in the archaeological record presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already indistinguishable from those of the existing population."

"Plans made without allowance for the intentions of the enemy are liable to miscarry. So it was to prove in 1916."

"The basic and stark fact, nevertheless, was that the conditions of warfare between 1914 and 1918 predisposed towards slaughter and that only an entirely different technology, one not available until a generation later, could have averted such an outcome. The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was to be an awful demonstration of that truth."

"[I]t is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

"Principle perhaps was at stake; but the principle of the sanctity of international treaty, which brought Britain into the war, scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection. Defence of the national territory was at stake also, the principle for which France fought at almost unbearable damage to its national well-being. Defence of the principle of mutual security agreement, underlying the declarations of Germany and Russia, was pursued to a point where security lost all meaning in the dissolution of state structures. Simple state interest, Austria’s impulse and the oldest of all reasons for war-making, proved, as the pillars of imperialism collapsed about the Habsburgs, no interest at all."

"Consequences, of course, cannot be foreseen. Experience can, by contrast, all too easily be projected into the future. The experience of the early warriors of 1914–18 – the probability of wounds or death, and circumstances of squalor and misery – swiftly acquired inevitability. There is mystery in that also. How did the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable, find the resolution to sustain the struggle and to believe in its purpose? That they did is one of the undeniabilities of the Great War. Comradeship flourished in the earthwork cities of the Western and Eastern Fronts, bound strangers into the closest brotherhood, elevated loyalties created within the ethos of temporary regimentality to the status of life-and-death blood ties. Man whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mysteries of human life."

"But then the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilise for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?"

"The accidents of military geography also began to work to the Germans’ disadvantage. The nearer they approached Amiens, the more deeply did they become entangled in the obstacles of the old Somme battlefield, a wilderness of abandoned trenches, broken roads and shell-crater fields left behind by the movement of the front a your earlier. The Somme may not have won the war for the British in 1916 but the obstacle zone it left helped to ensure that in 1918 they did not lose it."

"It is one of the many graveyards which are the Great War’s chief heritage. The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless planes of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the war’s political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened, the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial outcasts, the persecution of ideology’s intellectual and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments and the elevation of commissars, gauleiters and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in the chaos it left behind. Of that, at the end of the century, little thankfully is left. Europe is once again, as it was in 1900, prosperous, peaceful and a power for good in the world."

"Little ground was gained, much life lost."

"This book began as an enquiry into the origins of the great European witch-hunt. It ended as something wider. It argues that the stereotype of the witch, as it existed in many parts of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is made up of elements of diverse origins, and that some of these derived from a specific fantasy which can be traced back to Antiquity."

"The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered."

"Beneath the pseudo-scientific terminology one can in each case recognize a phantasy of which almost every element is to be found in phantasies which were already current in medieval Europe. The final, decisive battle of the Elect (be they the ‘Aryan race’ or the ‘proletariat’) against the hosts of evil (be they the Jews or the ‘bourgeoisie’); a dispensation on which the Elect are to be most amply compensated for all their sufferings by the joys of total domination or of total community or of both together; a world purified of all evil and in which history is to find its consummation - these ancient imaginings are with us still."

"Lightning victories, experience tells, store up evil consequences, usually for the victors."

"All worked excellently, until fighting began."

"How easy it is, in retrospect, to see that that was so, how difficult at the time to except the fallibility of governments and general staffs. The fundamental truth underlying dissatisfaction with systems and with personalities in all countries was that the search for anything or anyone better was vain. The problem of command in the circumstances of the First World War was insoluble. Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices, unable to watch the operations they set in progress, unable to hear reports of their development and unable to speak to those whom they had originally given orders once action was joined. The war had become bigger than those who fought it."

"All European armies in 1904 had long-laid military plans, notable in most cases for their inflexibility. None was integrated with what today would be called a ‘national security policy’, made in conclave between politicians, diplomats, intelligence directors and service chiefs, and designed to serve a country’s vital interests, for such a concept of national leadership did not then exist. Military plans were held to be military secrets in the strictest sense, secret to the planners alone, scarcely communicable in peacetime to civilian heads of government, often not from one service to another."

"The effect exerted by paper plans on the unfolding of events must never be exaggerated. Plans do not determine outcomes. The happenings set in motion by a particular scheme of action will rarely be those narrowly intended, are intrinsically unpredictable and will ramify far beyond the anticipation of the instigator. So it was to prove with the Schlieffen plan."

"Time, in all crises, is usually the ingredient missing to make a solution. It is best supplied by an agreement on a pause."

"The tragedy of the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the fighting in August 1914, which was to swell into the four-year tragedy of the Great War, is that events successively and progressively overwhelmed the capacity of statesmen and diplomats to control and contain them. Honourable and able men though they were, the servants of the chancelleries and foreign officers of the great powers in the July crisis were bound to the wheel of the written note, the encipherment routine, the telegraph schedule. The potentialities of the telephone, which might have cut across the barriers to communication, seem to have eluded their imaginative powers. The potentialities of radio, available but unused, evaded them altogether. In the event, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilisation."

"War’s rancours are quick to bite and slow to heal."

"Within fifteen years of the war’s end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise. Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means."

"The opening months of the First World War marked the termination of two hundred years of a style of infantry fighting which, with decreasing logic, taught that drill and discipline was the best defence against missile weapons, however much improved."

"It was broadly true that all European royalty were cousins; even the Habsburgs of Austria, most imperious of sovereigns, occasionally mingled their blood with outsiders; and since every state in Europe, except France and Switzerland, was a monarchy, that made for a very dense network of interstate connections indeed."

"The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass deaths that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation."

"The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots."

"The failure of the generals of 1914 had largely been a pre-war failure. They had had the wit to adapt to the technologies ready to hand, particularly that of Europe’s many-branched real net work, to their purposes. They had lacked the wit to perceive the importance or potentialities of new technologies, among which the internal combustion engine and wireless-telegraphy, as radio was then called, would prove the most important; they had, indeed, lacked altogether the wit to perceive the problems to which such new technologies would be the solution. No such charge could be laid against the admirals of the years before 1914. With foresight they had divined the significance of the developing technologies likely to affect their service and had applied them to it with exactitude. Admirals have traditionally had a reputation as seadogs and salthorses with little ability to see far beyond the bulwarks of their ships and little desire to change anything within them. Nineteenth-century admirals are commonly thought to have opposed transition from sail to steam as fiercely as generals opposed the abolition of scarlet coats. Nothing could be further from the truth. When the admirals of the Royal Navy were persuaded that sail had had its day, they displayed a ruthless lack of sentimentality for the beauty of pyramids of canvas. The sailing navy was abolished almost overnight after the Crimean War, in which steam gunboats had devastated wooden walls."

"The system of communication itself denied any rapidity, let alone instantaneity, of communication when it was most needed, which was in the heat of action. The most important of the novelties of modern warfare in our own time has been the development of surveillance, targeting and inter-communication in real time, which is to say at the speed at which events unroll."

"The 1914 battles in the Eastern Front therefore closely resemble those fought by Napoleon a hundred years earlier, as indeed did those of the Marne campaign, with the difference that infantry lay down rather than stood up to fire and that the fronts of engagement extended to widths a hundred times greater. The duration of battles extended also, from a day to a week or more. The outcomes, nevertheless, were gruesomely similar: huge casualties, both absolutely and as a proportion of numbers engaged, and dramatic results."

"The regulations of 1911 insisted that the riflemen of the infantry could ‘without the support of the other arms, even in inferior numbers, gain victory as long as [they] were tough and brave’. This was a view common to the continental armies, German, Austrian and Russian as well as French, the most ideological exponent of the ‘spirit of the offensive’, and was based not merely on affirmation but on an analysis of the nature of recent combat in, particularly, the Russo-Japanese War. It was accepted that high levels of firepower entailed high casualty rates; it was still believed that a determination to accept heavy casualties would bring victory."

"What was the issue was not the combatativeness of the British soldier but the still colonial outlook of their commanders, who expected decisive results for a comparatively small outlay of force and shrank from casualties. French generals, from a different tradition, expected large casualties, which their soldiers still seemed ready to suffer with patriotic fatalism. The British soldier, regular, Territorial, wartime volunteer, was learning a similar abnegation, while their leaders were coming to accept that operations in the new conditions of trench warfare could succeed only with the most methodical preparation. The qualities of dashing improvisation that had brought victory in mountain and desert for a hundred years would not serve in France."

"By the end of 1915, none of the original combatants was fighting the war that had been wanted or expected. Hopes of quick victory had been dashed, new enemies had appeared, new fronts had opened."

"With Calicut at his mercy, da Gama might have sent his soldiers ashore to put to the sword as many of its citizens as they could seize. Instead, he told his men to parade the prisoners, then to hack off their hands, ears and noses. As the work progressed, all the amputated pieces were piled up in a small boat. The Brahmin who had been sent out by the Zamorin as an emissary was put into the boat amid its new, gruesome cargo. He had also been mutilated in the ordained manner. The historian Gaspar Correa describes what da Gama did next: When all the Indians had been thus executed [sic], he ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them: and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats; and they were put on board, heaped on top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them, and the sails to be set for the shore, and the vessel set on fire … and the small vessel with the friar [Brahmin], with all the hands and ears, was also sent ashore, without being fired."

"The transfixing of men hung in mid-air was one of the admiral’s favourite forms of execution, since it gave his soldiers good practice. However, there was a strange incident when three among a group of captured sailors from the Coromandel coast threw their hands up to heaven and told him that they wanted to become Christians. Da Gama, unmoved, ordered the interpreter to tell them ‘that even though they became Christians, yet still he would kill them’. The ship’s priest was allowed to baptize them none the less, and as he declaimed the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria they recited his words. ‘When this was done, then they hanged them up strangled, that they might not feel the arrows.’ The crossbowmen transfixed the rest of da Gama’s victims strung from the yardarm; but the arrows which struck the newly-baptized trio ‘did not go in, nor make any mark’. At this, the admiral seemed troubled. The three bodies were shrouded and thrown into the sea, which the chronicler of this event called the Lord’s ‘great mercy’ to gentiles. The priest said prayers and read psalms. However, da Gama was troubled only briefly. When yet another Brahmin was sent from Calicut to plead for peace, he had his lips cut off, and his ears cut off; the ears of a dog were sewn on instead, and the Brahmin was sent back to the Zamorin in that state. He had brought with him three young boys, two of them his sons and a nephew. They were hanged from the yardarm and their bodies sent ashore."

"As his ship reached the entrance to Goa harbour, on 15 December 1515, Albuquerque died just before dawn, aged sixty-three. His mark on the history of the Indian Ocean was indelible, and he had had the satisfaction of knowing that his foremost enemy, the Zamorin of Calicut, Mana Vikrama, had gone before him. He had done his best to arrange that."

"The pattern of killing, destroying and burning was soon to be given the imprimatur of Vasco da Gama himself, when in the middle of 1502 he sailed once more into the Indian Ocean. The king’s ‘almirante amigo’ now commanded twenty-five ships, the ten largest containing ‘much beautiful artillery, with plenty of munitions and weapons, all in great abundance’. Thirteen of the ships under da Gama’s command belonged to wealthy Portuguese merchants. Since his first appearance less than five years before, in command of three small vessels groping their way towards an uncertain goal, everything had changed. Da Gama was now clear about where he was going and what he meant to do. The Zamorin had ‘treated him with contumely’, so he ‘felt in his heart a great desire to go and make havoc of him’."

"In the XXI. yere, whan Kyng Philip of Frauns was fled thus cowardly fro the sege of Caleys, thei of the same town offered the town to Kyng Edward withoute any poyntment. And he lay in the town a month, considering the strong disposicion thereof. Thanne, at instauns of the Pope, was taken trews betwix the two Kyngis for a yere. Aboute the fest of Seynt Michael, the Kyng took the se into Ynglond and there had he grete tempest, and mervelous wyndes; and thanne he mad swech a compleynt onto oure Lady, and seide, O blessed Mayde, what menyth al this? Evyr, whan I go to Frauns, I have fayre wedir, and whanne I turne to Ynglond intolerable tempestes.In the XXII. yere were grete reynes, whech dured fro the Nativite of Seynt Jon Baptist onto Cristmasse.And aftir that reyne there folowid a grete pestilens, specialy in the Est side of the world amongst the Sarasines. So many deied, that there left scarsly among hem the tenth man, or the tenth woman. Thei, seyng this veniauns amongst hem, purposed veryly to be Cristen. But whan thei wist that the pestilens was among the Cristen men, than her good purpos sesed.In the XXIII. yere was the Grete Pestilens of puple. First it began in the north cuntre; than in the south; and so forth thorw oute the reme. Aftir this pestilens folowed a moreyn of bestis, whech had nevir be seyn. For, as it was supposed, there left not in Inglond the ten part of the puple. Than cesed lordes rentis, prestis tithes. Because there were so fewe tylmen, the erde lay untillid. So mech misery was in the lond, that the prosperite whech was before was nevir recured."

"There is an herb which is sowed apart by itself & is called by the inhabitants Uppówoc: In the it has divers names, according to the several places & countries where it grows and is used: The Spaniards generally call it Tobacco. The leaves thereof being dried and brought into powder: they use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of clay into their stomach and head; from whence it purges superfluous & other gross , opens all the pores & passages of the body: by which means the use thereof, not only preserves the body from obstructions; but also if any be, so that they have not been of too long continuance, in short time breaks them: whereby their bodies are notably preserved in health, & know not many grievous diseases wherewithal we in England are oftentimes afflicted."