Non Fiction Authors From England

"Lady Anne Egerton, the deceased Lady Bridgewater's only daughter, married first Wriothesley Duke of Bedford, and secondly to Lord Jersey. This lady inherited such a share of her grandmother's imperial spirit, as to match her pretty fairly, and insure daggers' drawing as soon as it should find time and opportunity to display itself. But, ere the stormy season set in, the grandame had acquired her picture; which she afterwards made a monument of vengeance, in no vulgar or ordinary mode. She did not give it away; nor sell it to a broker; nor send it up to a lumber-garret; nor even turn its front to the wall. She had the face blackened over, and this sentence, She is much blacker within, inscribed in large characters on the frame. And thus, placed in her usual sitting-room, it was exhibited to all beholders."

"The Duchess...made court at the accession of the present family, by abusing Queen Anne to the Princess of Wales (afterwards Queen Caroline). One day relating her violent quarrel with her mistress, She said to the Queen, "then, Madam, you mean to bring over your Brother!" The Queen replied, "I wish I was sure he was my Brother!"—This implied two things, that She doubted whether he was genuine; & that if he was, She would bring him over. "And yet, continued the Duchess, the Creature (Caroline was shocked at such an expression used about a Queen—and might have been shocked more at the ingratitude of the Woman who used it), notwithstanding her letters, knew he was her brother." The Princess asked what She meaned by notwithstanding her letters—She meaned those the Queen had writ, and as She owned by her advice, as it was her then beleif, to persuade the Prince and Princess of Orange that Queen Mary of Este was not with child—which after King William came over, they found so much reason to doubt—enough, it is plain, to convince the Duchess that the Cheavlier was King James's Son."

"In 1946 a little pamphlet was published under the provocative title A Palestine Munich?, and a true period piece it is. Its authors were R.H.S. Crossman and Michael Foot, two clever Oxford men who were newly elected Labour MPs. ... Foot and Crossman pronounced that curse upon the Attlee government, for betraying the Zionist cause as Chamberlain had betrayed the Czechs. What's so remarkable from today's vantage point is that Crossman and Foot were not only Labour men but very much on the left of the party. And yet that was unremarkable at the time."

"Lady Bateman struck the first stroke, and persuaded her Brother to marry a handsome young Lady, who unluckily was daughter of Lord Trevor, who had been a bitter enemy of his Grandfather the victorious Duke. The Grandam's rage exceeded all bonds. Having a portrait of Lady Bateman She blackened the face and wrote on it, "now her outside is as black as her inside". The Duke She turned out of the little Lodge in Windsor park, and then pretending that the new Duchess & her female cousins, eight Trevors, had stripped the house and garden, She had a puppet-show made with waxen figures representing the Trevors tearing up the Shrubs, and the Duchess carrying off the chicken-coop under her arm. Her fury did but increase when Mr Fox prevailed on the Duke to go over to the Court. With her coarse intemperate humour She said, "That was the Fox that had stolen her Goose". Repeated injuries at last drove the Duke to go to law with her. Fearing that even no Lawyer would come up to the Billingsgate with which She was animated herself, She appeared in the court of justice, and with some wit and infinite abuse treated the laughing public with the spectacle of a Woman who had held the reins of empire metamorphosed into the Widow Blackacre. Her Grandson in his suit demanded a sword set with diamonds given to his Grandsire by the Emperor. "I retained it said the Beldame, lest he should pick out the diamonds and pawn them.""

"The word CHURCH had never any charm for me, in the mouths of those who made the most noise about it; for I could not perceive that they gave any other distinguishing proof of their regard for the thing than a frequent use of the word, like a spell to enchant weak minds; and a persecuting zeal against Dissenters and against those real friends of the Church who would not admit that persecution was agreeable to its doctrine. And as to Affairs of State: Many of these Churchmen seem to me to have no fixed principles at all, having endeavored during the last reign, to undermine that very government which they had contributed to establish."

"We all know what an astonishing personality Sarah's was: her beauty, her passionate devotion to her famous husband, her forthrightness, candour and sincerity, her possessiveness and tenacity, the jealous spirit that went with it, her quarrelsomeness and next to impossibility for anybody to live with. She was like a flame that scorched, rather than warmed, everything that came near her. And yet one would forgive her everything for her magnificent answer to the Duke of Somerset: "If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John, Duke of Marlborough.""

"For me, the edges of a picture are the most important areas. I like to think of the image as a small segment of a much larger scene, so that you feel that, if you could see behind the edges of the "snapshot" there would be something equally, or more, interesting going on. It's a window into another world, but you don't necessarily have to see the window frame. You might even see more clearly without it."

"I’m not free to do whatever I like stylistically, since my work is going to be wedded to the words. The responsibility is to help to tell the story, without interfering with the readers’ imagination. In a way it is a bit more akin to a sets designer or to providing music for a film. You are serving the text and you are serving the story. So that’s what I do. I’m an illustrator. But I think you have to be an artist to be able to do that as effectively I can."

"I think of the art of illustration as essentially one of collaboration. It’s a wonderful thing to work with a writer and to discuss ideas and make sure the writer is completely in harmony with and happy with the things I’ve added to the mix."

"There is real wisdom there about respecting the environment that more enlightened people, supposedly, have forgotten all about."

"You do get these similar stories everywhere. And I think part of that is because the underwater world is so unknown. The human mind doesn’t like a vacuum. We will populate that vacuum with the contents of our own head, and often that’s scary stuff. It’s a blank canvas. Often what happens is that real creatures get mixed up. They’ll get our own baggage mixed up with their reality, and part of my job is to sort that out."

"Eating a fish from a river used to be a birth right, but those days are long gone. Now it’s our duty to put them back."

"The thing about rivers, is if you work with them, if you give them a little bit of help, it’s surprising how much they respond. And I think that is cause for hope. If we can just change our attitudes just a little bit, from being out-and-out exploitative to just sort of drawing back a little bit, and just giving them a little bit of thought and help… they do have this incredible regenerative power."

"Fear has a useful function: it concentrates the mind. And the appropriate reaction is to work to understand the thing that is causing the fear whether it’s a large fish or anything else. This way both parties are more likely to survive the encounter unscathed."

"We live in the information age where in theory everybody knows anything. You ask somebody where your fish comes from, they don’t know. You go, “Is that because you can’t tell me or because the system is designed to obscure that fact?” Which unfortunately is the case a lot of the time."

"Jokiness allows a constant trivializing: as if by joking someone is suspending judgment on what is being said. She didn’t mean anything by it; lighten up. A killjoy knows from experience: when people keep making light of something, something heavy is going on"

"To point out harassment is to be viewed as the harasser; to point out oppression is to be viewed as oppressive."

"There are some who hold onto rigid ideas of w:Femalebiological sex, but I do not expect feminists to be among them. When I hear people refer in code to "biology 101," meaning the scientific basis of female and male sex difference, to claim that trans women are not “biologically women,” I want to offer in rebuke, “Biology 101? Patriarchy wrote that textbook!” and pass them a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, a radical feminist text that supports transsexuals having access to surgery and hormones and challenges what she calls “the traditional biology of sexual difference” based on “two discrete biological sexes.” To be so-called gender critical while leaving traditional biology intact tightens rather than loosens the hold of a gender system on our bodies."

"Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground."

"We learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Not being accommodated can be pedagogy. We generate ideas through the struggles we have to be in the world; we come to question worlds when we are in question. When a question becomes a place you reside in, everything can be thrown into question: explanations you might have handy that allow you to make sense or navigate your way through unfamiliar as well as familiar landscapes no longer work."

"The exposure of violence is perceived by the privileged as the origin of violence."

"Transphobia and antitrans statements should not be treated as just another viewpoint that we should be free to express at the happy table of diversity. There cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are in effect (or intent on) arguing for the elimination of others at the table. When you have “dialogue or debate” with those who wish to eliminate you from the conversation (because they do not recognize what is necessary for your survival, or because they don’t even think your existence is possible), then “dialogue and debate” becomes a technique of elimination. A refusal to have some dialogues and some debates is thus a key tactic for survival."

"In the Chronicles, you get the presence of Lewis. You get the cast of his mind in a way that's unequalled in any of his other books. Lewis once said that the imaginative man in him was more basic than any other aspect. In the Chronicles, every part of him was brought into play: the depth of his intellect, the depth of his knowledge, the richness of his imagination. They all work organically together and achieved this remarkable series of not one, but seven connected books. It's folly to predict the future, but being a fool, I'll say that maybe in 150 years it will be The Chronicles of Narnia that are the most remembered of Lewis's work."

"Just as we can explore Narnia and Middle-earth, there is a way-of-seeing amongst the Inklings (even they don’t see identically) that is attractive and has a kind of homeliness, despite the choking tobacco smoke and half empty glasses on table surfaces swimming with ale and cider. Their way-of-seeing is often challenging to us as moderns, because in their own ways they are intent on undeceiving us (to use a term of Lewis’s). They see us as needing a perspective from outside of ourselves to see both the strengths and weaknesses of our own period."

"Colin has the gift of synthesizing a great deal of material and making it wonderfully clear and accessible. When I see Colin’s name on a book, I know it will be trustworthy and true."

"I get angry about so many things I read in the news. But I think it’s good to be angry. If we stop being angry about what’s going on around us then we normalise those injustices."

"I've had quite a normal childhood. I hear of people who act and they've never been to a real school. I think, well, good for you, you're so successful that you don't have to go to school but you're not really preparing yourself for the real world, and acting isn't the real world."

"What characteristic distinguished Germany and Italy, where fascism took power, from countries like France and Britain, where fascist movements were highly visible but remained far from power? We need to recall that fascism has never so far taken power by coup d'état, deploying the weight of its militants in the street. Fascist power by coup is hardly conceivable in a modern state. Fascism can not appeal to the street without risking a confrontation with future allies —- the army and the police —- without whom it will not be able to pursue its expansionist goals. Indeed fascist coup attempts have commonly led to military dictatorship, rather than to fascist power (as in Romania in December 1941). Resorting to direct mass action also risks conceding advantages to fascism's principal enemy, the Left, still powerful in the street and workplace in interwar Europe. The only route to power available to fascists passes through cooperation with conservative elites. The most important variables, therefore, are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascist, along with a reciprocal flexibility on the fascist leaders' part, and the depth of the crisis which induces them to cooperate."

"For some US allies, the fixation on words at a time when the international order was arguably facing its greatest challenge since the second world war encapsulated the glaring absence of US leadership. And that absence was illustrated just as vividly by news coverage of planes full of medical supplies from China arriving in Italy, at a time when the US was quietly flying in half a million Italian-made diagnostic swabs for use in its own under-equipped health system and Donald Trump was on the phone to the South Korean president pressing him to send test kits."

"Neither Hitler nor Mussolini took the helm by force, even if they used force earlier to destabilise the liberal regime, and later to transform their governments into dictatorships. They were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of his conservative counsellors,under quite precise circumstances: a deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarisation that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control, often at a moment of massive popular mobilisation; an advancing Left; conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left, and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

"Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous."

"Mr. Montagu was fourteen when Dr. Johnson, whom he knew, died; he was the intimate associate of Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth; he watched by Mary Wollstonecraft's deathbed; Sir James Mackintosh helped to steady those liberal principles which were growing somewhat wild under Godwin's influence; his home was the haunt not only of Londoners like Charles Lamb, but of young men from the country before they grew famous, if only they had promise in them, like Edward Irving and Carlyle."

"George Eliot's Salon on Sundays was a stately reception, in which her talk was always well worth hearing: she raised conversation on whatever subject she touched to a higher level. Miss Anna Swanwick is the only other person I know with the same immediate power of raising the conversation with apparent continuity and without seeming to force it."

"Literature has had little to say of the labourer; and this, not that his class is lacking in interest, in poetry, in romance, but simply because those sections of society to which writers belong know nothing about him."

"I read Tennyson for myself, learning by heart the greater part of the original volumes and thinking, as I still think, that for subtle workmanship no one had at all approached the same perfection since Milton. I did not then recognise how little thought is contained in that pomp and melody of verse, still less how very little of what thought there is, is the poet's own. For instance, a very large number of people are apparently unaware that Tennyson's idyll "Dora" is simply a story in Miss Mitford's Our Village broken up into blank verse with poetic touches added, and in later life his "Idylls of the King" are whole chapters of Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion treated in the same way."

"With perhaps the exception of Dr. Johnson and Lord Tennyson, it is difficult to name any men who, writing really good works, lived by those works and by the pensions conferred upon them on account of those works. With those exceptions, I can think of no one whose books have lived and are likely to live, who have not either had an independent fortune or a profession quite apart from literature, by which they gained at least a modest living."

"Alas, it was also originally Needham's Marxist and Weberian point of departure. As Needham found more and more evidence about science and technology in China, he struggled to liberate himself from his Eurocentric original sin, which he had inherited directly from Marx, as Cohen also observes. But Needham never quite succeeded, perhaps because his concentration on China prevented him from sufficiently revising his still ethnocentric view of Europe itself.[29]"

"J Needham's (1971) monumental work on Chinese nautics offers by far the most scholarly synthesis on the subjects of Chinese shipbuilding and navigation. His propensity to view the Chinese as the initiators of all things and his constant references to the superiority of Chinese over the rest of the world's techniques does at times detract from his argument.[28]"

"However critical I gradually turned of most of Needham’s views, it was his work above all that convinced me of the indispensable aid cross-culturally comparative history of science..."

"Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about Nature (as for example in the Sarokhya atomic theories of Kshana, bhutadim paramanu, etc.), including also biological speculations ... When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found I believe, that Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises ..."

"Joseph Needham, has stated, "Future research on the history of science and technology in Asia will in fact reveal that the achievements of these peoples contribute far more in all pre-Renaissance periods to the development of world science than has yet been realized.""

"It is good to remember, therefore, that our own pious founders were not the only men, and that Christendom was not the only culture, to set on foot great and noble institutions of learning where successive generations of students assembled to get the benefits of education and research. When the men of Alexander the Great came to Taxila in India in the fourth century BC they found a university the like of which had not then been seen in Greece ... and was still existing when the Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hsien went there about AD 400."

"For three thousand years a dialogue has been going on between the two ends of the Old World. Greatly have they influenced each other, and very different are the cultures they have produced. We have now good reason to think that the problems of the world will never be solved so long as they are considered only from a European point of view. It is necessary to see Europe from the outside, to see European history, and European failure no less than European achievement, through the eyes of that larger part of humanity, the peoples of Asia (and indeed also of Africa)."

"We know that the trigonometric sine is not mentioned by Greek mathematicians and astronomers, that it was used in India from the Gupta period onwards (third century).... The only conclusion possible is that the use of sines is an Indian development and not a Greek one. But Tannery, persuaded that the Indians could not have made any mathematical inventions, preferred to assume that the sine was a Greek idea not adopted by Hipparchus, who gave only a cable of chords. For Tannery, the fact that the Indians knew of sines was sufficient proof that they must have heard about them from the Greeks."

"European and America must stand ready not only to share with all Asians and Africans those treasures of understanding and use of Nature which modern science and technology brought forth, but also to learn from them many things concerning individual life and society which they are more than competent to teach. If this is not done, the achievements of Europe (and America) will in any case become the common property of mankind, but our civilization will go down in history as distorted and evil, unwilling to practice what it preached, and worthy of the condemnation of ten thousand generations."

"To seek the ultimate origin or predisposition of the Indian conviction in the profoundly Hindu world view of endless cyclical change, kalpa and mahakalpas succeeding one another in self-sufficient and unwearying round. For Hindus as well as Taoists, the universe itself was a perpetual motion machine."

"We cannot forejudge what the future developments of the history of science will bring forth, but if India was probably less original than China in the engineering and physico-chemical sciences, Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about Nature (as for example in the Samkhya atomic theories of Kshana, bhutadi, paramanu, etc.), including also biological speculations .... When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found I believe, that Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises as those which have emerged from the recent study of China -whether in mathematics, chemistry, or biology, and especially the theories which were framed about them."

"He had a tendency — not entirely justified in the light of more recent research — to think well of Taoism, because he saw it as playing a part that could not be found elsewhere in Chinese civilization. The mainstream school of thinking of the bureaucratic Chinese elite, or 'Confucianism' (another problematic term) in his vocabulary, seemed to him to be less interested in science and technology, and to have 'turned its face away from Nature.' Ironically, the dynasty that apparently turned away from printing from 706 till its demise in 907 was as Taoist as any in Chinese history, though perhaps its 'state Taoism' would have seemed a corrupt and inauthentic business to Needham.[31]"

"Cambridge scientist historian Joseph Needham’s loyalty was to Mao’s version of Stalinism as a system, but he got enamoured with China itself and wrote a very Sinocentric history of Science and Civilization in China, highlighting the unexpectedly large contribution which China has made to human progress."

"We are entering an alarming situation where many poorer countries will face increasingly burdensome debt repayments while simultaneously attempting to manage an unprecedented public health crisis – all in the context of a very deep global recession. And let us not harbor any illusions that these intersecting crises might bring an end to or the emergence of some kind of "global social democracy." As we have repeatedly seen over the last decade, capital frequently seizes moments of crisis as a moment of opportunity — a chance to implement radical change that was previously blocked or appeared impossible."