Non Fiction Authors From England

"Man's interest in consuming , as well as in using their feathers for warmth and their fat for lighting and heating, was behind their early domestication. Two goose species were involved, the and the , and two ducks, the and the . Features of all wildfowl domestication include large size, a reduced number of tail and wing feathers, flightlessness, rapid maturation, an increased clutch size, long breeding season, loss of 'broodiness' (so that the technique of artificial incubation becomes necessary at an early stage), loss of aggression, a polygamous mating system, and the laying down of abdominal fat."

"The is perhaps the evolutionary link between the , and the . The Mallard has been domesticated for over 2,500 years. the Romans initiated the process in Europe, and the Malays in Asia."

"Kear was instrumental in efforts to save the — from extinction. Over-exploitation and the introduction of the predatory to the had reduced an estimated 18th-century population of 25,000 to less than 30 by 1949. Three birds taken into captivity and sent to the WWT's , , headquarters formed the basis of a captive breeding programme. Thus were 200 reintroduced to Hawaii by the WWT during the 1960s, and more than 2,200 by the early 1990s. In the late 1970s, she moved from Slimbridge to become curator of in the north-west, making her the first woman in charge of a regional centre. She developed it into one of the most important in the WWT chain. It now attracts up to 20,000 and 1,300 s each winter, with large numbers of people enjoying the spectacle."

"In 1949 Grace and Ian Telfer, an member, decided to mark in an attempt to follow their movements. Though s are resident on the , nothing was known about them outside the breeding season. The first seals were tagged in 1951, and within fifteen days the first marked seal was recovered in Norway. This was ground breaking research as no one had realised how far the Grey Seals were traveling."

"On 3rd December, 1958, ten calves were killed on the North Wamses, a small island some three miles off the north coast. This was the first licensed killing of grey seals during the breeding season since the passing of the 1932 Grey Seals Protection Act and it was intended to be the first stage of an experimental annual cull of 300 calves, recommended as a means of reducing the grey seal population of the and thereby lessening the damage done by seals to the salmon fishing industry."

"These youngsters appear to have little fear of man for Jack Shiel tells the story of how, on a day in late autumn when they were line fishing for , a young kept helping himself to the best fish while the men were taking the others from the hooks."

"To-day, although numbers of s are still taken—in addition to the some 30,000 yearlings of the are killed each year—the decrease in the number of whales, and the increasing demand for edible oil has meant a growing emphasis on the exploitation of seals for oil."

"The can readily be distinguisedh from the true wild Swans, the and the , for it arches its neck much more and its bill is reddish orange with a protruding black knob at the base ..."

"Wrens do not appear to indulge to any great extent, though they appreciate drinking water. It should be remembered that if birds have plenty to drink in summer they are less likely to make attacks on fruit."

"At the time the was formed the main interest in birds lay in whether they or their eggs were good to eat, or in their possibilities as a source of amusement at which to blaze off a gun."

"What is esotericism? From the Enlightenment until the middle of the last century, magic, astrology, and occultism, to take a few of the subjects now considered under the rubric of esotericism, were generally perceived as survivals of superstition and irrationalism. The intellectual status of such topics was denigrated, and they were kept in epistemological quarantine lest they cause a relapse from progressive rationalism. Just as the established churches had once excluded heterodox doctrine as heresy, the modern post-Enlightenment world rejected magic and occultism as a violation of reason, its dominant criterion of acceptable discourse."

"We cannot know what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The multiracial challenges in liberal Western states are much greater, and it is evident that affirmative action and multiculturalism are even leading to a more diffuse hostility toward liberalism. From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or 2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies."

"As long as the West upholds an image of the free human being within an integrated vision of God, heaven, and earth, esotericism will undoubtedly remain a feature of its intellectual and religious landscape."

"RACE IS THE lodestone of the Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism, the guiding principle of their historical and political worldview. American neo-Nazism, represented by George Lincoln Rockwell and his successors, adopted the Nazi view of the Jews as the ferment of liberal society, variously promoting communism, civil rights and race mixing."

"Outside a purely secular frame of reference, Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime, a monstrous pagan relapse in the Christian community of Europe."

"Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world. The cultural pessimism of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano all express the fear of (Aryan) white submergence in a degenerate age dominated by social and racial inferiors. Their adoption of Hindu chronology is intended to plot the curve of that decline into the Kali Yuga with the millennial promise of regeneration through a new golden age in the cycle of the ages. Francis Parker Yockey likewise articulates a mythic philosophy of history, whereby the European races are (temporarily) disabled by alien Jewish influences and prevented from fulfilling their destiny in a powerful new Imperium or world empire."

"THE RELIGIOUS AND MYTHIC elements of German National Socialism often made the Third Reich resemble a cult in power."

"It is a tragic paradox that the colourful variety of peoples in the Habsburg empire, a direct legacy of its dynastic supra-national past, should have nurtured the germination of genocidal racist doctrines in a new age of nationalism and social change."

"The risks of racist religiosity are great. By projecting grievances, fears and anxieties onto the "shadow" figures of other races, religious transcendence is stunted and perverted into the dynamics of exclusion and hatred. Instead of genuine spirituality, there is partiality, separation, restriction. A rigid self-righteousness leads down into the spiritual basement of a primitive dualism, where pseudo-salvation depends on the elimination of the Other. The political projection of religious Manichaeism onto human differences inevitably leads to strife and violence. Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness, both the human community and humanity itself are diminished. Such degraded religion never leads to light but only into darkness."

"The Nazi dreams did not come true. The Great Hall of Berlin with its enormous dome was not completed in 1950; the Wewelsburg was not reconstructed as a gigantic SS vatican by the 1960s; the giant motorways and broad gauge railways as far as the Caucasus and the Urals were never laid; Western Russia was not transformed into a huge colonial territory for German soldier-peasants; nor did the SS libensborn stud-farms produce 150 million pure-blooded Germans for the New Order. The glorious One Thousand Year Reich actually ended a mere twelve years after its proclamation with the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. But even if these grandiose plans and megalomaniac visions had not gone beyond the stage of maps, memoranda and miniature models, the Third Reich had accomplished sufficient demolition of the old order in Europe for it to remain an outrage which still haunts literature, films, and the memory of survivors."

"Powerful ideas of anti-Semitism as a form of world-rejecting gnosis, Aryan paganism as a global religion of white supremacism, and Hitler as a divine being within a cosmic order together compose an unholy theology of the Aryan myth. Seen in this light, neo-Nazism has all the characteristics of an international sect with a religious cult. There are devotional practices, initiates and martyrs, prophecies and millennial expectations, and even relics."

"Both the trappings and the myths of American Nazism reflect the behavior of a persecuted religious sect that prepares for militant action against a fallen world."

"For historians trained exclusively in the evaluation of concrete events, causes, and rational purposes, this netherworld of fantasy may seem delusive. They would argue that politics and historical change are driven only by real material interests. However, fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups. Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action."

"All nature has intrinsic worth and equality, and whatever science that remains should be nondominating."

"The cybernetic encirclement of man and his complete divorce from nature could well foster a more fundamental alienation. In a congested and automated world, Savitri Devi's sentimental love of animals and hatred of the masses may find new followers. The pessimism of the Kali Yuga and her vision of a pristine new Aryan order possess a perennial appeal in times of uncertainty and change."

"Science, the Art of Understanding Nature"

"Bathurst is a restless, curious writer, and she interweaves the story of her own experiences with imaginative research around hearing and sound. She interviews people who were and those who have , from army veterans to s to s. She visits an ear-splitting shipbuilders’ yard, and sits in an anechoic chamber; she interviews a professor of and an . In every chapter she comes up with gems of information. ... Bathurst’s story provides a satisfying narrative arc. After 12 years of her hearing gradually deteriorating, she was diagnosed with a disorder called , which can be cured by means of a delicate operation to the . Results are variable but in Bathurst’s case the operation was a success, and her hearing was almost completely recovered."

"It seems that publishers have awakened to the realization that the history of technology can provide some very good stories. Six years ago we had 's colorful account of 's epic struggle to make a , . Now Bella Bathurst has made an excellent yarn out of the careers of the who built most of the lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. The story was told with more solidity in 1978 by Craig Mair as A Star for Seamen. But not to worry: there is a splendid archive of Stevenson family material, much of it now in the , and Bathurst has drawn on this and other primary material to construct her story."

"Field Work’s aim is to broaden and insert nuance into our understanding of farming. Bathurst moves to live in a attached to Rise Farm, a 180-acre Welsh hill farm run by Bert and Alison Howell. ... Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her about the land. ... I thought often of ’s glorious agricultural novel All Among the Barley while reading Field Work. Partly it’s the engagement with a dying way of life. Partly it’s the fact that both books understand how important accurate and specific language is to bringing this rural existence alive on the page. Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her honestly and movingly about the land and their place within it. One passage, in which a young farmer describes night-time with her father, is among the loveliest pieces of writing I’ve read anywhere."

"Any very loud may eventually damage or disrupt the and lead to the death of s, whether that's an always on full volume or . Sometimes that damage results in hearing loss and sometimes it results in , where true sound is replaced by sounds the brain itself has made. Some people hear hissing or fizzing or clicking, or a steady like an internal . Tinnitus can be loud or soft, constant or intermittent, but of all the different kinds of s it's often considered the worst because it covers over the sounds that people want to hear with a drizzle of sound that they don't."

"At this time, in 2004, I am deaf. Not completely deaf, just down to about 30 per cent of normal hearing. I had started to lose my hearing in both ears about seven years ago and it has been declining ever since. I wear s in both ears and when I take them out, I can hear individual fragments of sound but not really the links between them. Certain words in a sentence or specific sounds are audible, but music is only a beat and a voice is just a chain of broken s."

"In Holland, the subject of one of her most satisfying chapters, she marvels at a cycling landscape that could have been reclaimed from the sea with the bicycle in mind, and discovers that, far from taking to two wheels like ducks to water, doughty Dutch velocipedists of the mid-19th century were bombarded with stones and coal by locals who accused them of traumatising the . Modern Dutch cyclists have taken the land into their own hands. She examines a where, thanks partly to a parallel and partly to the "bizarre" notion that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist, the accident rate per 100 cycled is 0.8 – a tenth of that in the UK."

"Seven years ago, I moved into a farm on a hill near Wales. Rise Farm was run by Bert and Alison Howell, a couple in their seventies whose son had gone to live in Spain and whose main source of assistance was now their two s – Bryn and a dog who for a long time I genuinely believed to be called Come Here You Useless Bugger. Rise was one of a declining number of small farms making the best of the high places in the , places which would once have represented a generous living but which now struggled by on rents, subsidy and the heart-attack price of lamb."

"Though few other countries had Britain's unique combination of advantages for a — island status, a vicious coastline, plenty of expensive traffic — almost every country with a coastline produced their own variants. There were Flemish wreckers, Spanish wreckers, Scandinavian wreckers. The French were such expert wreckers that they had been responsible for . In the , wrecks were so frequent that the eighteenth-century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage."

"Henry’s major problem was that the local communities of England rather liked the idea that the ruler needed their consent if he were to rule legitimately. It was no longer enough that Henry was God’s anointed; the reforms that had followed in the wake of the Provisions of Oxford had created a widespread expectation that consent could and should be a political force in national politics. Simon and his baronial colleagues had not acted alone in their reforms, but had tapped into the grievances of the county communities of thirteenth-century England. Indeed, it was these local grievances that gave the reformers their political weight."

"In thirteenth-century Europe, battles were rare, in part because they occurred only when both sides felt certain that they had the decisive advantage (it was relatively straightforward to avoid battle when necessary) and in part because the quickest way to win a battle was to kill or capture the opposition commander; unlike their modern counterparts, medieval war leaders led from the front and, as a result, were subject to more than their fair share of attention. A leader had to be certain of success if he were to engage the enemy in a battle."

"We might like to think of Henry III as a gentle and pious king (an image he wanted us to see), but many of those who suffered under the rule of his local officials had a different perspective on their monarch."

"We cannot know what impact the loss of his mother may have had on the young Henry. Modern historians have been critical of her actions, seeing them in terms of ‘abandonment’, but the medieval mindset was not the same as ours, and it is unwise to ascribe modern sensibilities to our medieval forebears, especially when it was perfectly normal for them to be brought up outside the nuclear family and within a broader familial network, which might include cousins and aunts and uncles living in far-flung places."

"The greatest problem that Henry faced was that, after a long minority, his subjects had become used to a king who did not rule."

"Henry might not be King Louis’s equal in matters of war, but he would be in matters of style (the confusion of style with substance is a recurring theme in Henry’s life)."

"In the September Parliament, Henry made the announcement that the lands of Simon and his supporters were forfeit, and that the main beneficiaries were to be members of the royal family. In this act we are once again reminded that many thirteenth-century men and women had a tenuous grasp of the ethics of rulership, despite their repeated public pronouncements to the contrary: the kingdom was put there by God in order that they might predate on it."

"gave Britain's capital cities two of their greatest landmarks, the , generally, if inaccurately, known as ,1 and, in Edinburgh, the . He built the first since 's and he r. But his influence depended not only, not even primarily, on his buildings, it was both wide and more elusive. He gave the nineteenth century a new idea about what architecture could be and mean. He saw it as moral force in society and as a romantic art. (p. 1) 1. It is in fact the bell that is called Big Ben. (p. 536)"

"The first detailed depiction of Stonehenge to survive is a , now in the , by . De Heere was a artist who lived in London from 1567 to 1577 and seems to have made another, less distinguished, contribution to the subject by carving his name on sarsen 53. Meanwhile, despite doubts about its reliability, , remained popular and its account of Stonehenge was repeated by other authors. Only with the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship and the dawn of the , did it begin to fall out favour, for the nature of history writing itself was changing."

"Most contemporaries would have argued that it was a king’s job to put in peril his soul for the good of his Church and of his people. But Henry was too self-obsessed to do that, too determined to live a life of a confessor saint and thereby join the mystical body of Christ in heaven and so be revered by the faithful in this world. In an age when the cult of royal saints was in the ascendancy, Henry’s ambition is understandable, but it was hardly justifiable and it was certainly not heroic."

"A difficulty for Hill is that many of the she celebrates will be no more than names to most readers. But she combats this by selecting details that bring them to life. , for example, co-founder of the , lived in picturesque squalor in an abandoned convent with an alcoholic wife and children who ran wild among the ruins. He eked out a living as a commercial artist and taught drawing to, among others, Gustave Flaubert, whose portrait he drew. ... Hill is a magnificent historian and commands a vast range of sources. Her great strength, as she showed in her witty book on Stonehenge, is that she is not inclined just to laugh at what seem ludicrous beliefs. Rather, she carefully unpicks them, showing what made them attractive to their cultures. Time’s Witness is a book to change the way you think about history."

"Daisy Hay’s nuanced readings of Mary Shelley’s works, combined with photographs of manuscripts, books or physical artefacts from the collection, give readers a vivid picture of Mary Shelley’s time and how she translates life into art. As Hay in the concluding chapter argues, Frankenstein—as a productive, ethical and political metaphor—articulates the anxieties of an age inundated with , innovations and sudden changes."

"As with all the best s, Hay makes her readers drag their feet towards the end, reluctant to part company with people she has made us know and feel for. Her book has turned the ’ uneven romance into a real love story. How pleased they would have been."

"In common with other young writers whose lives were linked with theirs, Shelley, Keats and Byron were indebted to an earlier trio of Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, whose work marked a striking break with the rational, of the early eighteenth century. This break had a profound effect on literary culture in the decades following the French Revolution. Unlike Blake, whose work remained largely unread for decades after his death, Wordsworth and Coleridge were famous in their own time. Contemporaries of both poets were startled by the distinctiveness of their work, and by the ."

"became a and a in an age when books appeared to have the potential to change the world. Between 1760 and 1809, the years of Johnson's adulthood, Britain experienced a during which nothing was certain and everything seemed possible. On paper charted the evolution of Britain's relationship first with America and then with Europe: several were intimately involved in the struggles that reformed the ."

"In 1980 Earl Anderson published an article in ' on the history of foot races in which he characterised the old women's race in ' as a delightful instance. That view, thankfully, is not replicated elsewhere. Pioneering Burney scholars, including and Kristina Straub, have read the race as symbolic of a social system that dehumanises women and is a literalisation of male brutality."