Non Fiction Authors From England

""I don’t have all the answers to old age. In fact, I rarely think about it"."

"But during the first lockdown, I found it really hard to write, it seemed such a self-indulgent thing to do."

"Then I met an ICU doctor during a swim at a local reservoir, and she told me the only way she was coping was by listening to audio books, and that made me start writing again."

"I’ve never thought of myself as a cultural activist, but thanks! The reason I work in different fields is mainly to make a living – professional authors in the UK now earn an average of around £10,000 a year, it’s usually impossible to live just from writing books."

"Also I don’t get bored if I have several projects on the go."

"I’m very driven, and I think you have to allow yourself, especially as a woman, to give yourself time to write, and to treat it seriously."

"Carrying both this comedy and the book's angry elegies is Hollinghurst's beautiful prose, which mixes the colloquial and the aesthetic to produce a language at once physical, lyrical and austere."

"Helen Pluckrose: I thought I knew the rules but there were more layers and layers of rules than I thought, and I've actually been studying it for seven years. Heather Heying: Do you think that there is a kernel, inside all of this, that has some integrity? Helen Pluckrose: I don't think so because that base isn't liberal feminism, it's not gay pride, it's not the civil rights movement or anything like that. The base is postmodernism which had then had layers of critical theory and then, joined on the end, of the civil rights movement and appropriated it. So right at the base there is the hole. There is no objective knowledge. Everything is systems of power. So it didn't have a chance from the start. Heather Heying: The foundation is rotten. Helen Pluckrose: Yeah."

"There are strong echoes of Powell and Waugh, but Hollinghurst's richly textured narrative and achingly evocative prose is masterful and his alone."

"I was sent there Canford School] in 1967, at the age of thirteen, and at some point in my first year was issued with the OUP anthology Fifteen Poets: Chaucer to Arnold. This was my introduction to "Tintern Abbey", "Kubla Khan", Keats's Odes and many other poems which, read over and over, became and have remained a sort of inner music for me, whether purposely memorised or not. But the one of the fifteen who spoke most persuasively to my adolescent mind was Tennyson, in "The Lady of Shalott", "Ulysses" and the lyrics from The Princess; I won the junior reading competition with a passage from "Morte d’Arthur", making the most of the "sharp-smitten" clanging crags and "the long glories of the winter moon". Those effects, like many of Tennyson's best, are slightly over-orchestrated, a display of unrestrained assonantal genius, with a fascinating power of prickling the scalp, much treasured at that age, and for me never lost."

"Other reviewers have noted the strong overtones in Hollinghurst's novel of Proust as well as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, but there is a distinctly Jamesian aura that plays around the stressed and complex analogies The Line of Beauty proposes among social privilege, social transgression, economic ravenousness, and inviolable commitments to pleasures of various kinds and intensities."

"Hollinghurst moves characters between background and foreground in different sections, meticulously picking up figures, information, ideas strewn earlier to shine a different light on past and present alike: the technique of staggered information, always a mainstay of narrative, has been fashioned into something altogether more transformative, more pointed. It is woven with stupendous deftness, its internal assonances making a complex, comprehensive harmony."

"When I first came here Hampstead Heath] I was starting my second novel, The Folding Star, which is a very twilight book, a time of day I've always loved. On those summer evenings when I set out on walks, I'd often end up on a bench here, analysing the changing light and the colours. There was a lot of pastoral poetry woven into that book; I think I was filling out an imaginary landscape based on the one in front of my house."

"[John Betjeman's] ability to make people laugh resounds through this book as persistently as church bells do through his poems."

"... I have still never seen a ghost for myself, even in the shadier vaults of the British Museum, where the ancient dead can lie peacefully, and many of the living have witnessed strange things. Sometimes I have crouched immobile in the evening darkness at the top level of our Victorian Arched Room library, like a wildlife photographer at a waterhole, waiting in silence for a spectral figure who has, they say, more than once been observed. For me, though, no shady visitor."

"In contrast to mourning and burial, it is the deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish forever that separates us absolutely from the whole animal kingdom. No gorilla or bald-headed eagle ever had an inkling of their inner self finishing up somewhere once the proud body had collapsed into chemicals. It is only the early human mind that grew to strive against the prospect of the final annihilation of self, a hallmark rebellion that became hard-wired into, and always an essential element of, human nature. It is the incalculable antiquity of the first stirrings towards post-mortem existence that explains the enduring and universal belief in ghosts. Ghosts have waited in the wings from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible."

"In the years around the turn of the present century, relying on the contacts and expertise of , (1835–1909), put together what came to be one of the most wide-ranging and important collections of cuneiform tablets to have been assembled in private hands in this country. Since the publication of Volume 1 of The Amherst Tablets in 1908 by Pinches, followed much later by 's The Pinches Manuscript, the Amherst Collection has been familiar enough among Assyriologists, but perhaps less has been known of the collector, and of his other collections. The Museum at the family estate of Didlington Hall, Northwold, Norfolk, contained in its heyday a much broader range of material than cuneiform inscriptions. From the Near Eastern world there were very extensive collections of Egyptian papyri and antiquities, but the Hall also housed remarkable accumulations of incunabula and printed books, porcelain, tapestries, sculpture and other works of art."

"The is one of the world's best-known cuneiform inscriptions and at the same time one of the most famous archaeological objects in the British Museum in London."

"Within the field of Assyriology the royal cuneiform libraries of , the Assyrian capital city, have no parallel for size, breadth, or document quality. ... The bulk of the library material had been put together at royal bequest with the specific intention of housing, editing, and recopying the traditional written expressions of Mesopotamian culture in, as far as possible, a complete state. Assurbanipal's long reign (668–c.627 ) in character was one of stability and affluence and there was ample opportunity for the pursuit and accumulation of manuscripts in abundance. Thus it fell to and those who came after him to uncover what was in essence a 'state of the art' royal library, whose underlying conception constitutes the only rival to the lost resources of Alexandria that the ancient world can provide."

"... I think the ultimate issue about ghosts is human arrogance. The ultimate, ultimate point is that I am me — the greatest hunter in the world — nineteen wives and four hundred and thirty-two children — and the best spear thrower in the world. I'm going to die? And it's all going to be over? No way!"

"'s discoveries led to unease in more than one quarter. It was simply bizarre that a close relative of Holy Writ should emanate from such a primitive, barbaric world through so improbable a medium, to thrust itself uncompromisingly into public consciousness. How could Noah and his Ark possibly been known and important to the Assyrians of noble and the Babylonians of mad, dread ? Worried people over garden fences and in church pews clamoured to have important questions answered."

"! The world's oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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]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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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

"In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, so assiduous in her letter-writing, such an advocate for the letter (‘write again, write more fully’), burnt the hundreds of letters and notes she had received from her poetic grandmother Evelina. Not ‘Who would be interested?’ But ‘Don’t come near this. This is private.’… There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live…. The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. I think of a library carefully sorted into boxes. I think of all those careful burnings by others, the systematic erasing of stories, the separations between people and their possessions, and then of people from their families and families from their neighbourhoods. And then from their country."

"‘Don’t you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?’ said a stern neighbour of mine in London. And I find I am shaking as I answer, because this matters…. No I answer. Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters."

"‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered that on the list of priorities in a shattered society, the restitution of property to those from whom it had been sequestered came near the bottom. Many of those who had appropriated Jewish property were now respected citizens of the new Austrian Republic. This was also a government that rejected reparations, because in their view Austria had been an occupied country between 1938 and 1945; Austria had become the ‘first victim’, rather than an agent in the war."

"I don't agree that we should dismiss certain art forms and we should create a hierarchy. That's what the academies in the 18th century really did. They said painting and sculpture is at the top, and embroidery and craft like decorative arts is at the bottom. And what did women have access to? Decorative arts and craft."

"Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus."

"I have been working long enough as a potter to know that being commissioned is an extremely delicate business. You are grateful, of course, but gratitude is different from feeling indebted. It is an interesting question for any artist: how long must you go on feeling grateful once someone has bought your work?"