university-college-london-faculty

"Written accounts of Benin describe periods of fluctuating power and prosperity disturbed by civil wars which appear to have been caused by disputes over the succession to the kingship...Between periods of dissension the kingdom seems to have shown remarkable powers of recovery...The history of Benin, then, is one of alternating periods of territorial expansion and contraction in accordance with the degree of power and authority at the centre."

"It is impossible at the present time to determine the extent of the Benin empire at any particular period in the past...The frontiers were continually expanding and contracting as new conquests were made and as vassals on the borders rebelled and were reconquered."

"The pandemic exposes weaknesses of current leadership of global public health systems, inequities of resource allocation to Africa, and broken promises by wealthier nations for vaccine equity and resource allocation. This status quo is unacceptable."

"The transformation has been profound, illustrated by advances in the development and roll-out of rapid diagnostics, new drugs, and shorter and safer treatment regimens through capacity building of laboratory and trial sites, and empowerment of a younger generation of African and European investigators."

"The urgent priority now is to get TB control efforts back on target in light of the setbacks incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic."

"This is the start of a much-needed step-up change in African leadership and increased resources, which will motivate young African researchers to build their careers within Africa and advance front-line research."

"To provide guarantees, we’ll of course perform extensive testing. This will give us some confidence about the way in which the vehicle will behave over a broad range of standard and corner cases. But testing is necessarily incomplete however extensive our testing, it can never be exhaustive. There are only a finite amount of situations one can test."

"The general public will experience the car as a vehicle that performs journeys on our cities’ roads, getting people from A to B quickly and affordably. But, under the proverbial bonnet, there will be plenty more going on. These are not cars as we’ve known them. They’re autonomous in the sense that the car will be taking a number of decisions independently during the journey."

"With this in mind, we need to think about how we can give guarantees that the actions the vehicle will perform are safe with respect to its integrity and the environment. Let’s remember that we do not only have to consider the passengers but also the environment, which will be diverse and complex, encompassing other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, buildings, weather conditions, and more."

"A major challenge in deploying ML-based systems, such as ML-based computer vision, is the inherent difficulty in ensuring their performance in the operational design domain. The standard approach consists in extensively testing models against a wide collection of inputs. However, testing is inherently limited in coverage, and it is expensive in several domains."

"I’m here to help Five tackle the challenge of verifying autonomous vehicles. I have a clear aim: to help Five find ways of giving guarantees that Five’s cars are safe, so passengers can step inside the vehicle knowing it will do no harm to them or those around them."

"On the 1170, the morrow of the , that is to say, Tuesday, 29 December, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, of the whole of England and of the , was murdered in his cathedral church by four noble knights from the household of his lord and former patron and friend, King Henry II. He had just celebrated what was thought to be his fiftieth birthday. The horror which the killing inspired and the miraculous cures performed at his tomb transfigured the victim into one of the most popular saints in the late-medieval calendar and made one of the greatest pilgrim shrines in the West. The modern , although doubtless better organized, gives some idea of medieval Canterbury with its phials of water tinctured, if faintly, with the blood of the martyr, and its highly charged atmosphere, a combination of the pathetic hopes of the sick and the jollity of the holiday-makers. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales kept the saint's memory green after the Reformation, and the drama has attracted distinguished modern playwrights."

"William Rufus had a remarkable career, even for the late eleventh century, when opportunities for the adventurous and talented were plentiful. Born into the middle ranks of the French aristocracy, and only a younger son, he rose first through the achievements of his father, William 'the Conqueror', duke of Normandy, and then through the misfortunes of his elder brothers. Still a landless when his father died in 1087, he took whatever chances came his way, and by the time of his own premature death thirteen years later had become a king of great renown. He was acclaimed by soldiers for his chivalry and magnanimity; and the flaws of his character proved to be no hindrance to success."

"Barlow's intellectual and scholarly qualities are arguably most evident in his editions of complex and technically difficult Latin texts, whose meaning he would elucidate with an almost unrivalled brilliance, and in the writing of biography, a genre about which he thought very deeply, as befitted someone who had contemplated a career as a novelist in his youth. Edward the Confessor (1970), William Rufus (1983) and Thomas Becket (1986) are all very important, and demonstrate a profoundly insightful and carefully reasoned determination to penetrate the religious attitudes of the historians of the 11th and 12th centuries in order to reveal the secular world beneath."

"The lantern which William of Malmesbury used to guide his steps when he was writing his ' ... was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals written in ; and it remains the surest guide. It is particularly valuable, because the first draft, at least, of that part of the Chronicle which covers most of 's reign was put together before the king's death, ... a circumstance which ensured that the events recorded were not chosen so as to explain either the or ."

"In our present case of the historical paradigm, the outsider, Cobban, appeared and precipitated the overthrow of the old paradigm but unfortunately, if understandably, he could not provide a new one. That is the problem, the crisis now facing students of the Old Regime and the Revolution."

"The frank recognition of the dominance of power politics in international relations has not been without its effect on the writing of domestic French history. One consequence is that the traditional admiration for Napoleon, and the effort to present him as something other than a military conqueror and dictator, has become difficult even for French historians. Emphasis on the ideological element in the policy of revolutionary governments has also diminished and the desire for territorial aggrandizement, and even more for economic change, come to be seen as a dominant influence over their foreign policies."

"The emphasis on the social grounding of politics was, moreover, something which Cobban himself shared, as he showed by developing a "social interpretation of the French Revolution" which highlighted the role of disenchanted venal office-holders (rather than a supposedly triumphant capitalistic grouping) as the true Revolutionary bourgeoisie. He and other Anglo-American scholars who followed in his wake invariably saw the eighteenth-century economy as traditionalist and uncapitalistic – a view which fitted in nicely with the "immobile history" preached by third-generation Annaliste Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie."

"At any point the course of the Revolution could be diverted by a chance happening or an individual decision determined by a freak of personal character. No adequate general history of the Revolution can fail to bring before our eyes a host of individuals, marking with their own idiosyncrasies the events in which they participated. The records are so ample that the deeds and personalities of lesser men as well as of the great stand out clearly. At the same time, the historian whose bias lies in the detection of great impersonal forces can write the history of the Revolution in quite different terms. It would be a mistake to suppose that either approach is exclusively right. The right approach is determined only by the nature of the questions the historian is asking and the right answer by the material of which he asks them."

"The "revolutionary bourgeoisie" as a class concept, Cobban found, dissolves under close analysis. What remains is a loose congeries of socially and economically disparate "middle classes." "Feudalism," whatever it had been, did not exist in eighteenth-century France. What was "overthrown" in 1789 was a vestige of feudalism—admittedly a hated and often onerous one—seigniorial rights. And it was the peasantry, not the "revolutionary bourgeoisie," which acted first and unanswerably against what they labeled "feudalism." In so acting, that is, without regard to and even in opposition to the desires of the Third Estate majority in the National Assembly, the peasantry cannot be subsumed "within the cadre of a bourgeois revolution.""

"Just seventeen years ago the late Alfred Cobban opened the case against the "orthodox interpretation" of the French Revolution. Ten years later, in 1964, he summed up that case in his brilliant essay on The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cobban's argument and works inspired by or complementary to his revisionism have profoundly affected the historiography not only of the Revolution but of the Old Regime as well. We are today still working out the implications of Cobban's position. Briefly, what Cobban did was to demonstrate that the empirical data gathered by historians, including "Marxist" and "Neo-Marxist" historians, had exploded the "Marxist" theory which purported to explain the Revolution."

"It remained for Alfred Cobban to play the role of Copernicus and point out the emperor-theory's nakedness. At least his writings of some twenty years ago constitute the most apparent landmark of the revisionist school. Cobban's main points were that the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century — he did not question its existence — was neither (a) capitalist or industrial, (even in intent), nor (b) revolutionary. Rather than being a class of "industrial entrepreneurs and financiers of big business," the bourgeoisie was composed of "land-owners, rentiers, and officials." Itself a class deeply involved in privileges, it abhorred the thought of revolution. Moreover, this bourgeoisie was, he thought, not rising but declining. Cobban recognized the confusions in the situation and called for new, freshly directed research. He was sure that historians had imposed on the Old Regime a "sociological theory" drawn from a later age, one that did not fit that earlier epoch. They had looked into the mirror of their own age rather than into the past, and they had seen Rockefeller and Lenin rather than the real Necker and Voltaire, thus misreading the whole code. Cobban further noted the obvious fact that so far as France was concerned, the Revolution did not usher in a triumphant capitalism but in fact had impeded modernization, industrialization, technological innovation for a century or more. He added that when historians construed the Parisian sans culottes of the Revolution as an incipient proletariat they also mistook reality by importing later ideas, a point others had already made."

"The circumstantial interpretation seems to be forced on us particularly when we look at the history of international relations during the revolutionary period. True, public opinion in all countries saw the struggle as an ideological one between revolution and established order; but those who actually determined international policies were free from this illusion, though they had to allow for and were prepared to make use of it in others. The history of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars can be told almost exclusively in terms of power politics and explained by the traditions of the countries involved and the personalities of their rulers and ministers."

"That the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion. Sooner or later, all states do collapse, and ramshackle, asymmetric dynastic amalgamations are more vulnerable than cohesive nation-states. Only the 'how' and the 'when' are mysteries of the future. An exhaustive study of the many pillars on which British power and prestige were built — ranging from the monarchy, the Royal Navy and the Empire to the Protestant Ascendancy, the Industrial Revolution, Parliament and Sterling — indicated that all without exception were in decline; some were already defunct, others seriously diminished or debilitated; it suggests that the last act may come sooner rather than later.110 Nothing implies that the end will necessarily be violent; some political organisms dissolve quietly. All it means is that present structures will one day disappear, and be replaced by something else."

"The difference between a referendum and a plebiscite is a fine one. Both pertain to collective decisions made by the direct vote of all qualified adults. The referendum, which derives from Swiss practice, involves an issue that is provisionally determined in advance, but that is then 'referred' for a final decision by the whole electorate."

"The immediate future may be determined by a race between the United Kingdom and the EU over which beats the other to a major crisis."

"All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue."

"The revolution was to an important extent one against and not for the rising forces of capitalism. In addition it can be interpreted...in terms of a general tension and social antagonism between the poor and the rich."

"One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations — like the United States of America or Australia — from diverse ethnic elements."

"The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords."

"There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together."

"On reading somewhere that the Welsh name for 'England', Lloegr, meant 'the Lost Land', I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call 'England' was once not English at all."

"The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes."

"Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot."

"The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians’ own version of their history; but it is fundamental."

"When Henryk Sienkiewicz set Poland alight with his tales of chivalry, it was Cossack life in 17th-century Poland that stirred his readers. Just as many great 'Englishmen' turn out to be Irishmen or Scots, so many great 'Poles', like Mickiewicz, Słowacki, or Kościuszko, turn out to be Lithuanians."

"They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war."

"Historical knowledge does not need artificial protection. ... The truth about the past can only be established and strengthened by the clash of wisdom and absurdity. If absurdity is banned by the law, wisdom too is diminished."

"Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today’s important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored."

"Contrary to some expectations, Europe's brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The 'Railway Age' was also the age of muscular Christianity."

"Provisional age data now show that between 2000 and 3000 BCE, flow along a presently dried-up course known as the Ghaggur-Hakkra River ceased, probably driven by the weakening monsoon and possibly also because of headwater capture into the adjacent Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers."

"If enough people in society can be convinced that history is governed by scientific laws: that Soviet-style Socialism is the inevitable product of historical progress: and that the Soviet Union embodies all the finest socialist ideals of peace, equality, and justice, then rational people should be incapable of defying the rule of the Soviet government and its chosen allies."

"For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia."

"Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. Whether one deals with prehistoric recipes, colonial settlements, or medieval music, it needs great imagination and restraint if the twin perils of artless authenticity and clueless empathy are to be avoided."

"Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules: 1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'. 2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies. 3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends. 4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one's viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure, and by 'psychological contagion'. 5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations."

"It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident."

"... in Justinian's time, the Roman language of law, though debased—as is clearly shown by comparing the terms of any passage of Gaius' Institutes with the terms of the amending passage in Justinian's Institutes—was still equal to its purpose, and was intelligible throughout the bulk of the populations affected by the law. The intensely centralized administration and the current system of judicial procedure and appeals tended to keep the Latin tongue, if not everywhere a vulgar dialect, at all events a necessary accomplishment for all aspirants to office. At the same time the Greek language, which, in Constantinople and all the chief ports of Asia Minor, in Greece itself, in Syria, and in Alexandria, was the language of the market-place, the exchange, and, as it would seem, the polite coterie, afforded a secondary vehicle for the diffusion of Justinian's laws."

"It is well known that up to the time of Bentham the law of England, and more especially the most antiquated portions of it, or the "," was obsequiously venerated on all side, by judges, practising lawyers, legislators, and the general public, as the "perfection of human reason." If such a view seemed to shock common sense, when brought into glaring contrast with the actual anomalies, contradictions, barbarities, and irrational formalities which characterized every portion of the , the difficulty was got over by ascribing all that was reasonable and precise to the Law, and all that was necessarily repugnant even to the acclimatized temperament of legal practitioners, to false interpretations of it."

"One fallacy is that International Law has no existence whatever, and is a mere fiction of the political imagination. This assertion is usually made by those who, either for some particular argumentative purpose wish to prove it a fiction, or, by their own criminal acts, have already done that was in their power to render it such. It is no doubt perfectly true that the body of International Law is at present very imperfectly developed. Many of the rules which compose it are uncertain, ambiguous, or habitually interpreted in the most opposite senses. There are many doctrines which have the feeblest possible hold even upon the States which formally recognise them. There are other doctrines of the highest importance which, though very widely received and conformed to, are still frequently set at nought with utter impunity. But all this vacillation and uncertainty, taken by itself, gives the most incorrect picture of the practical cogency of the great mass of the Rules which compose the International Law of Europe."

"... Owing to the very minute proportion in which gold is often associated with rocks and mineral substances, it does not generally pay the cost of working; and the districts therefore known as auriferous or "gold-producing," in the the commercial sense of the term, are not so numerous ... Nearly all the gold of commerce has for a long time been obtained from , Brazil, Transylvania, Africa, the East Indian islands, and Carolina in the United States; the whole annual supply being estimated at about 80,000 pounds weight, and its value being about five millions . This however must be regarded as only an approximate value of the average of several years, as the supplies have for some time been increasing rapidly from the Russian mines."