Non Fiction Authors From England

"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."

"Without the mitigation effects offered through and isolation, the actual progress of the disease in the rest of the world will certainly be much more devastating than the harrowing scenes witnessed to date in China, Europe, and the United States. Moreover, workers involved in informal and precarious labor often live in slums and housing — ideal conditions for the explosive spread of the virus."

"Similarly disastrous scenarios face the many millions of people currently displaced through war and conflict. The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally displaced people as a result of the ongoing wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself."

"One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by , poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use). Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine — foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere."

"Debates around how best to respond to COVID-19 in Europe and the United States have illustrated the mutually reinforcing relationship between effective public health measures and conditions of labor, precarity, and poverty. Calls for people to self-isolate when sick — or the enforcement of longer periods of mandatory lockdowns — are economically impossible for the many people who cannot easily shift their work online, or those in the service sector who work in or other kinds of temporary employment. Recognizing the fundamental consequences of these work patterns for public health, many European governments have announced sweeping promises around compensation for those made unemployed or forced to stay at home during this crisis. It remains to be seen how effective these schemes will be, and to what degree they will actually meet the needs of the very large numbers of people who will lose their jobs as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, we must recognize that such schemes will simply not exist for most of the world's population. In countries where the majority of the is engaged in or depends upon unpredictable daily wages — much of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia — there is no feasible way that people can choose to stay home or self-isolate. This must be viewed alongside the fact that there will almost certainly be very large increases in the "" as a direct result of the crisis."

"The imminent public health crisis facing poorer countries as a consequence of COVID-19 will be further deepened by an associated global economic downturn that is almost certain to exceed the scale of 2008. It is too early to predict the depth of this slump, but many leading financial institutions are expecting this to be the worst recession in living memory. [...] Closely connected to this are the measures put in place by governments and s since 2008, most notably the policies of and repeated cuts. These policies aimed at propping up s through massively increasing the supply of ultra-cheap money to financial markets. They meant a very significant growth in all forms of debt — corporate, government, and household."

"Yet, while we rightly point to the lack of ICU beds, ventilators, and trained medical staff across many Western states, we must recognize that the situation in most of the rest of the world is immeasurably worse. Malawi, for example, has about 25 ICU beds for a population of 17 million people. There are less than 2.8 critical care beds per 100,000 people on average across South Asia, with Bangladesh possessing around 1,100 such beds for a population of over 157 million (0.7 critical care beds per 100,000 people). In comparison, the shocking pictures coming out of Italy are occurring in an advanced health care system with an average 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 (and the ability to bring more online). The situation is so serious that many poorer countries do not even have information on ICU availability. [...] Of course, the question of ICU and hospital capacity is one part of a much larger set of issues including a widespread lack of basic resources (e.g., clean water, food, and electricity), adequate access to primary medical care, and the presence of other (such as high rates of HIV and tuberculosis). Taken as a whole, all of these factors will undoubtedly mean a vastly higher prevalence of critically ill patients (and hence overall fatalities) across poorer countries as a result of COVID-19."

"In the face of the COVID-19 tsunami, our lives are changing in ways that were inconceivable just a few short weeks ago. Not since the 2008–9 economic collapse has the world collectively shared an experience of this kind: a single, rapidly mutating global crisis, structuring the rhythm of our daily lives within a complex calculus of risk and competing probabilities. In response, numerous social movements have put forward demands that take seriously the potentially disastrous consequences of the virus, while also tackling the incapacity of capitalist governments to adequately address the crisis itself. These demands include questions of worker safety, the necessity of neighborhood-level organizing, and social security, the rights of those on s or in precarious employment, and the need to protect renters and those living in poverty."

"In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis has sharply underscored the irrational nature of health care systems structured around corporate profit — the almost universal cutbacks to staffing and infrastructure (including critical care beds and ventilators), the lack of provision and the prohibitive cost of access to medical services in many countries, and the ways in which the property rights of pharmaceutical companies serve to restrict widespread access to potential therapeutic treatments and the development of vaccines. However, the global dimensions of COVID-19 have figured less prominently in much of the left discussion."

"Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis — as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates — but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world. In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders."

"As with all so-called humanitarian crises, it is essential to remember that the social conditions found across most of the countries of the South are the direct product of how these states are inserted into the hierarchies of the . Historically, this included a long encounter with Western colonialism, which has continued, into contemporary times, with the subordination of poorer countries to the interests of the world’s wealthiest states and largest transnational corporations. Since the mid-1980s, repeated bouts of — often accompanied by Western military action, debilitating sanctions regimes, or support for authoritarian rulers — have systematically destroyed the social and economic capacities of poorer states, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with major crises such as COVID-19."

"Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral and a lack of to a . The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster — not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes. One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public s across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 15–20 percent of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the United States, and lies behind the strategy of "flattening the curve" in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity."

"In India there have been reports of deaths among unemployed returning home in search of food; many countries, including the US, have seen workers taking industrial action, and anger has been expressed in rural communities over wealthy city-dwellers retreating to their second homes for the duration. Governments should keep an eye on these developments, in weighing up when and how to lift the lockdown, because even if it’s difficult to argue today that the cure is worse than the disease, the cure might provoke an entirely different malaise – and history teaches us that no society is immune to that. That’s the . In the long term, of course, they – and we – should address the dreadful inequality in our societies, which this pandemic is picking apart with a lethal scalpel."

"A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened? There is a that, historically, have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm."

"Pandemics don’t always trigger , but they can do, by throwing into relief the very inequalities that caused them. That’s because they hit the poor hardest – those in low-paid or unstable employment, who live in crowded accommodation, have underlying health issues, and for whom healthcare is less affordable or less accessible. This was true in the past and remains so today. During the the death rate was three times higher in the poorest fifth of England’s population than in the richest. Covid-19 is showing no signs of departing from the pattern, which, because of the way the socioeconomic dice fall, also has a racial dimension. But there is something brand new about this pandemic, which has never been seen before in the history of humanity – and that is our unprecedented global experiment in . These lockdown measures are designed to slow the spread of the disease, relieve the burden on s and ultimately save lives – and it looks as if they may be doing that. But they may also be exacerbating social inequalities themselves."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"It has become impossible to be simultaneously realistic about both the political climate and the science of climate. The two stubbornly refuse to reconcile, so we are forced to decide which carries more weight, and then be profoundly unrealistic about the other. To take present policy seriously demands a total rejection of the science. To take the science seriously demands a total rejection of the policy on the table. And so grassroots movements like the Extinction Rebellion and Climate Mobilization are emerging – the realists of a larger reality."

"The more one learns about Earth and her Earthlings, the more paradoxical the notion of a *Universal* Declaration of *Human* Rights appears..."

"Whatever you do will change the world. If you take the most default option, you follow the most mainstream, down the line, ‘just keep your head down and get on with what they’re telling you to do’, approach, then that’s the world that you’re helping to create. There is no way that you can not change the world."

"No system can ever relieve us of our personal responsibility, and it is essential that we all recognise the need to change the way we live."

"Resilience isn't predicting the correct future and preparing for it; resilience is acting in ways that make sense across the widest range of possible futures."

"The only economic system that has ever truly worked – the system upon which all others have depended – is Nature."

"Have you noticed how over recent decades, our expectations of the future have gradually shifted? How maybe we used to quietly assume that life for the next generation would be better than ours, and now quietly assume the opposite? That is not the mark of a civilisation that is making good choices. That is not a show that we need to get back on the road."

"The threat to our way of life is a consequence of our way of life. That's what unsustainability means."

"Put starkly, most of the wild nature that was here fifty years ago is gone. And still we seek to grow the human economy, and cheer when that growth accelerates."

"Failure to live up to a truth doesn’t make it any less true, less worth striving for, or less worth defending."

"Our globalised world finds itself caught on the horns of a seemingly impossible dilemma – either cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend."

"It is hopefully not too controversial to note that unsustainable things end. There are two possibilities from here – we dramatically change direction or we end up where we are headed. Either way, we are on the cusp of radical change."

"I always thought economics wasn’t the be-all and end-all of life. Now I realise it might be the end-all."

"Accusations of hypocrisy themselves tend to be rather hypocritical — if no hypocrites were permitted to hold opinions, there would likely be no opinions at all."

"There’s a really interesting thing about despair, I think. It has a spark in it of deep motivation. I think despair can be described as looking at every possible scenario and seeing no hopeful one. But what that means is, if you can present someone in despair with one scenario that looks hopeful – that looks like a real possibility – then there’s this immense wealth of motivation to drive toward it, because despair is not a nice place to be."

"It’s demonstrably not ‘simply human nature’ to annihilate all around us. No, it’s the nature of this particular human culture. Human potential is so much more, and that’s why conflating the two is so toxic."

"All our thoughts and beliefs are somehow hollow until they find expression in action."

"The first part of the essay calls into question the idea that the Germanic-speaking barbarians shared any sort of unifying ethos or culture that would allow us to conceive of them as a single entity. This section largely summarizes a particular direction in recent work, but the conclusion is still far from generally accepted or integrated in current study and so requires restating... The comprehensive rejection of the idea of a unifying Germanic ethos and identity among pre-migratory Germani removes the classic basis for nineteenth-century views of the German people as rooted in distant history... One inheritance of nineteenth-century (and earlier) notions of pan-Germanic culture is the unlikely notion that all Germani had access to a common range of cultural traits, upon which they could draw at will... Attempts to change this intellectually careless state of affairs are making only slow process."

"I twitch every time anyone mentions ‘Germanic’ culture."

"The recent use of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodologies to examine migration has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ (from excavated material) or ‘modern’ samples (from living populations), is being used to track migration. The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’ objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth- century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’."

"[T]he writing of history is inescapably political, my aim is partly to provide a basis for a more politically and ethically responsible intervention by historians in modern political debate about migration."

"Recently, something of an academic counter-revolution... has taken place. Oxford-trained historians have led the way, publishing books repeating the same argument: the barbarian migrations involved real ‘peoples on the move’, which brought down the Roman Empire. This has stimulated traditionalist archaeologists into a backlash against more nuanced interpretations of the material record. Whatever their authors’ politics (though these can be guessed at from their writings and publishing choices) there can be no doubt that these works have—in the most generous interpretation—been written sufficiently carelessly as to provide succour to far-right extremists. What is more, the barbarian migrations have become a popular metaphor among racists and other opponents of modern migration... The Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s preferred historical model was the Crusades but it is nevertheless significant that he described the killings as ‘a small barbarian act to prevent a larger barbarian act’,17 the latter being the supposed take-over of Europe by Muslim immigrants."

"The problems of Germanism have long been recognised. Alas, entirely analogous developments are currently taking place, also in the course of modern political movements, with the ‘Celts’. It is presently more fashionable and acceptable to talk of the ‘Celtic’ peoples as sharing a unified culture so that evidence from one area (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or Brittany) can be transferred unproblematically to the elucidation of another, sometimes regardless of chronological context. This is no more acceptable than Germanism."

"There can be no question of a general overriding ‘Germanic’ or ‘Celtic’ identity amongst the different barbarian groups. Shared language might have facilitated communication and alliance but there is no evidence for or reason to suppose a higher level of ethnic identity on this basis."

"Historians are not immune from similarly bizarre reasoning, of course. The counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking about the fifth century has been led by British historians from Oxford. Peter Heather has repeatedly deployed the notion that, because wagons, women and children are occasionally mentioned in sources concerning the barbarians, the barbarians must have been ‘peoples’ on the move... Such are the weakness and double-standards of the arguments in favour of the traditional narrative. You can list many more."

"The Nazis adopted these ideas with gusto but they did not invent them. Nor have post-Nazi archaeologists entirely abandoned some of their foundational notions. The idea of a really existing Germanic culture, unifying enormously diverse and disparate peoples living between the North Sea and the Ukraine and between the Danube and Scandinavia, has, in spite of its clearly contingent roots in early modern and modern political history, refused to go away. It has, however, now been turned around yet again, by misrepresenting ancient history as a binary opposition between civilized Romans and Germanic barbarians, to support modern xenophobic and anti-immigration policies."

"In the reinterpretation of ‘Germanic’ archaeology I have benefited from discussions with, and the encouragement of fellow-subversives... vive la re´volution!"

"[I'm] (probably) the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of 60 anywhere in the world... [T]hat's not (just) me being cocky, but a pretty sober assessment of the range and quality of my work."

"One of the problems that has most beset the study of early medieval Europe is, as noted, that of Germanism. This book aims to tackle this issue... To lump all Germanic-speaking tribes together is simply to repeat the assumptions of Roman ethnographers or the politically contingent Germanist interpretations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is, furthermore, the danger of assuming a linkage between Germanic-speaking barbarians of antiquity and the Germans of modern Europe. This was an approach adopted equally by nineteenth-century historians working in the context of German unification, by the Nazis and at the same time, polemically, by their enemies... [T]here are many occasions where modern historians and, especially, archaeologists, treat the different Germanic-speaking groups as sharing some sort of unifying ethos... It is implicit in such interpretations that all ‘Germanic’ peoples somehow share a common mentality. In their minds is a common stock of cultural traits which all ‘Germanic’ people can draw upon as and when they see fit. This may be claimed to be a reductio ad absurdam of traditional assumptions. It is, but only because these assumptions are fundamentally absurd."

"When you get older, as a leading lady it gets harder…You try not to have someone else upstage or take the shine. When I play character roles I am usually playing people who are slightly over the top, so that goes fine."

"She always taught me, ‘Open your heart when times get tough, accept what happens, live in the moment and reach out to help others as there’s always someone worse off than you’. She believed, rightly, that gives you purpose and helps you heal. So I always do my best to forgive and move forward."

"Over the years, I’ve learnt that out of challenge comes opportunity and I know if I hadn’t been tested, I wouldn’t have pushed myself or been able to discover my abilities."

"I was always left out when I was a little girl. I was different from everyone…People were jealous but I didn’t realise. I had a reunion with some school friends recently and they said, 'We were mean to you because you got special attention because you were so beautiful.’ I said, 'I wasn’t beautiful. I was gawky.’ I never ever imagined myself to look nice."

"Look, I can't speak for all trans women, but I just want to live my life the way I always imagined it. I have become the version of myself I wanted to be when I was four."