University Of Oxford Alumni

"The philosopher telleth us, truth and falsehood are nigh neighbours, and dwell one by the other: the utter porch of the one is like the porch of the other; yet their way is contrary: the one leadeth to life; the other leadeth to death: they differ little to the shew, save that oft-times the door of falsehood is fair, painted, graven, and beautifully adorned; but the door or forefront of truth is plain and homely. Thereby it happeneth that men be deceived; they mistake the door, and go into error's house, when they seek truth. They call evil good, falsehood truth, and darkness light. They forsake that is good, deny the truth, and love not the light."

"[W]e have searched out of the holy bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, one sure form of religion, and have returned again unto the primitive church of the ancient fathers and apostles, that is to say, to the first ground and beginning of things, as unto the very foundations and head-springs of Christ's church... [A]s the holy fathers in former time, and as our predecessors have commonly done, we have restored our churches by a provincial convocation, and have clean shaken off, as our duty was, the yoke and tyranny of the bishop of Rome, to whom we were not bound, who also had no manner of thing like neither to Christ, nor to Peter, nor to an apostle, nor yet like to any bishop at all."

"[I]f we do shew it plain, that God's holy gospel, the ancient bishops and the primitive church do make on our side, and that we have not without just cause left these men, and rather have returned to the apostles and old catholic fathers; and if we shall be found to do the same not colourably, or craftily, but in good faith before God, truly, honestly, clearly, and plainly; and if they themselves which fly our doctrine, and would be called catholics, shall manifestly see how all those titles of antiquity, whereof they boast so much, are quite shaken out of their hands, and that there is more pith in this our cause than they thought for; we then hope and trust, that none of them will be so negligent and careless of his own salvation, but he will at length study and bethink himself, to whether part he were best to join him."

"Jewel throughout his life was a diligent student, and made methodical notes of all that he read. He thus collected a mass of knowledge which was easily available for controversial purposes. He possessed a remarkable power of verbal memory, which made him a prodigy in the eyes of his friends. These qualities gave his writings an air of cold and mechanical precision, which was the natural result of his deliberate method. First he considered carefully the points which he wished to prove; then he selected the authorities whom he wished to quote in support of his position; he gave the references to a secretary, who copied out in full the passages specified; finally he arranged his argument in proper shape and embodied his quotations. Thus Jewel's writings are always clear, and the argument is conclusive within the limits which he has prescribed; but they are strictly logical, and make no appeal to the emotions. For that very reason they corresponded with the temper of England at the time, and did much to stamp upon anglican theology its distinguishing characteristics of reasonableness and sound learning."

"Personally Jewel had the kindliness and evenness of temper which characterise a true scholar. He was diligent in the discharge of his episcopal duties, and strove to set an example to his clergy of assiduous preaching. He showed his zeal for the advance of learning by building a library for the cathedral of Salisbury. He also used to maintain in his house and train for the university a few boys of promise. Among others whom he thus befriended was Richard Hooker, whom he educated at his expense and sent to Oxford. Hooker spoke of him as "the worthiest divine that Christendom had bred for some hundreds of years;" and it is clear that Hooker learned from Jewel the method and fundamental principles which he afterwards employed with greater fervour and literary skill than his master."

"This [Apology for the Church of England] was the first elaborate statement of the Anglican position in a work of first-rate importance, and it was immediately accepted as a clear and powerful exposition of that view. It remains one of the classic treatises of the Anglican ecclesiology. The Apology provoked a fresh attack from the Catholics. What with these writings and controversies, the cares of the diocese, activity in the general work of the church, and assiduous preaching, Jewel's never very strong health gave way. In 1571 he came home from Parliament much exhausted, but immediately undertook a visitation of his diocese. To the remonstrance of a friend he answered, "A bishop had best die preaching," and it was not long before the end came, in September, 1571."

"As for the Apology, it hath not only in all points and respects satisfied me, (by whom all your writings are so wonderfully well liked and approved,) but it appeared also to Bullinger, and his sons and sons-in-law, and also to Gualter and Wolfius, so wise, admirable, and eloquent, that they can make no end of commending it, and think that nothing in these days hath been set forth more perfectly. I exceedingly congratulate your talents upon this excellent fruit, the church upon this edifying of it, and England upon this honour."

"I love the British Museum, despite everything. I have had my eyes opened, my imagination set on fire, my intellect challenged by it too many times to mention. ... A fortnight ago, I stopped by to admire the beauty of the Parthenon sculptures, the galloping horsemen and reclining gods innocent of their role in a diplomatic feud. The museum was full of schoolchildren. The place was vibrating with the energy and excitement that comes from the encounter with glorious, awe-inspiring objects. But taking £50m from a polluter? It fills my heart with dread that the museum should take so wrong a turn."

"Social media have been saturated by the harrowing memories of a legacy the British establishment has refused to acknowledge. The plunder of land and diamonds in South Africa, crimes that adorned the Queen's very crown. The physical suffering that continues from violence inflicted by her government in Kenya, even as her reign was celebrated for having begun there. The scars of genocide in Nigeria, events that took place a decade into her rule. In Britain, minoritised people are remembering this Elizabethan era through the lens of the racism that was allowed to thrive during it."

"Hirsch’s focus is not the more violent racism she has suffered; the story of the man who took off his belt threatening to thrash her following a racist spat is only given a sentence. Rather it’s the many micro-aggressions that draw her attention. At Oxford University she was a self-consciously alien presence, irritated by porters who insisted she show her ID as she entered its colleges, while her white student friends were not stopped."

"The wording chills me slightly, with its suggestion of a regular consignment of Eton scholars as if by a law of nature."

"But "the classics" are so much more than this careless and aggressive chucking around of Latin and Greek tags, as if they were bread rolls at a Bullingdon club dinner."

"In north Staffordshire, it is perfectly acceptable, indeed polite social practice, to turn over a plate and inspect the backstamp if you are eating at a friend’s house. Because Stoke has historically had a rather stable, immobile population, memories are long and the tentacular reach of families into the pottery industry goes back generations."

"The classics and class have always been ­uncomfortably linked. In this country's education system, knowledge of the classics was traditionally the gatekeeper of privilege. If you ­acquired the classics (even as a humble stonemason's son, like Thomas Hardy) you gained a passport to the establishment. Fail (like Hardy's character Jude) and the corridors of power remained out of reach."

"If the prevailing feeling is that Latin and Greek are for toffs, then Boris [Johnson], frankly, is not the man to dispel that notion."

"“One of the keys things for me was thinking: how can we provide a safety net for people?”"

"I think the biggest lesson I’ve learnt is to trust my gut instinct. Trust your gut when you’re making these decisions, because often, it’s probably the right decision."

"I also think there are still a lot of gender biases within fundraising in general. When we look at our investor split, all our lead investors were women and I think that’s a testament to the fact that women investors are more likely to invest in female founders."

"The Nationwide editor, Michael Bunce, asked me if there was any particular film I'd like to make for them, so I asked if they would send me to Belfast to report on the Troubles. He said he would need time to think about it. Then he rang me back: "The thing is, Esther, what would you wear?" It was such a serious dilemma, he decided I couldn't film there."

"“The first step is always to try: get out there and do it”"

"The main thing is to focus on product market fit and not to spend too much before. Don’t spend on scaling before you’ve found the product market fit. Jihan's word of advice to aspiring founders"

"The episode of February 28, 1988, was just a normal one in the BBC’s consumer series That's Life!. ... But deep in the centre of the programme, where we always placed our most serious items, we had a unique moment that 35 years later still has the power to move and inspire. Nicholas Winton was revealed for the first time to have rescued more than 660 children, most of them Jewish, from being murdered in the Holocaust. And three of those children learnt for the first time who had saved them, how he had done it and, sitting with him in our studio audience, turned to him and thanked him for their lives. It was the only time in my professional life when, as a presenter, the emotion stopped me. I had to break off our recording, leave my chair and take a moment to wipe my eyes. We were the only factual programme that would have told his story that way because we were the only one with a studio audience. And we were thrilled to be able to stage another surprise for Nicky one week later, when we invited him back. This time I asked members of our audience to stand if they owed their lives to him. Nicky was once again sitting in the front row, so I asked him to turn round to see the whole ground floor audience in the television theatre standing."

"“Traction speaks for itself: if you are able to show progress and show results, then people get on board”"

"“Lami is pioneering innovation in the insurance sector, and we are glad to have secured the right partners to help drive insurance uptake across Africa. We are looking to make insurance easily accessible to everyone on the continent, and we will continually be unveiling more products that confirm this resolve.”"

"“My perspective on life and the impact I wanted my life to have on the world. I worked in a job where making money was the dominant motivation. For me, that didn’t seem like enough, and it’s also not what I wanted to stand for as a human being."

"“A lot of the time, people are relying on single sources of income, but they’re not insuring those sources of income so, if one thing goes wrong, they lose everything,”"

"Surely, if the Windsors were a business, analysts would say that it has a key vulnerability built on the absolute primacy of the chief executive, too small a board and too little flexibility in its model."

"I have joined Dignitas. I have in my brain thought, well, if the next scan says nothing's working I might buzz off to Zurich – but it puts my family and friends in a difficult position because they would want to go with me. And that means that the police might prosecute them. So we've got to do something. At the moment, it’s not really working, is it?"

"At Lami, we believe that using technology is the key to changing that by building the infrastructure and the rails for insurance products to actually work in a digital ecosystem."

"[On Giorgia Meloni, at the time prime minister of Italy] After decades of fractious coalitions and technocratic solutions, supporters relish her dominant leadership approach and mission to “defend” the country from outside influences. Meloni has now announced the "mother of all reform packages", a power grab that would allow prime ministers to be directly elected on minority vote shares. She will first have to escape the opprobrium of opposition in parliament and win a possible referendum. Given her success in manoeuvring herself and her party from the fringes of Italy's changeable landscape to outrun other far-right contenders such as Matteo Salvini and heirs to the Berlusconi legacy, it would be unwise to underestimate her chances."

"“How can we get insurance to as many people as possible, in the simplest and the easiest way? That’s the main vision for us—is really to create accessibility.”"

"[Describing a visit to Germany to prepare a radio documentary] The country's military past and future demands collide, often awkwardly but in a way that reminds us that one "change in times" is often soon succeeded by another emergency. The museum ship in the port is named after Werner Mölders (the first pilot in aviation history to shoot down 100 enemy aircraft while supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war and against France in the Second World War). It’s a bit unclear in the presentation whether he is seen as a dashing military ace or a legacy embarrassment."

"When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by."

"My older daughter, Emily, had ME for 14 years. Thankfully she is better now and lives with me. She recently joined Kabbalah and changed her named to a more biblical name, "Miriam" – a little hard for me as she was named after my maternal grandmother, Emily, whom I adored. But I get round it by calling her "Em"."

"[Y]ou may have seen... when the LHC was in the news, diagrams that look a little bit like this. These are called s after the famous physicist, Richard Feynman... [W]hat... most of my colleagues in particle physics do, is they take this [full Standard Model] equation, they figure out which particle's interacting and how: what's coming in, what coming out. They do twenty-one pages of calculations, and they come out with a number that is the probability of that interaction happening... [D]epending on which particles go in, you choose a different term that corresponds to those, and which particle comes out, you choose a different term that corresponds to those. Turn the handle and you get your result out the other end. I just taught you quantum field theory in about 2 seconds."

"It's really hard to convey in a few minutes, how amazing it is that we know this about the universe, and the predictive power that it has... [T]hat is the reason why we really built the Large Hadron Collider."

"[T]he way that we've learned all of this stuff about the universe is by taking the particles... smashing them into each other, and literally seeing what comes out."

"[I]f you take Einstein's equation E=mc2, E is energy, m is the mass and c is 299,792,458 meters per second, so that squared, I'd have to get to tell me what that is, but that's a very big number. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to create even a tiny tiny amount of matter. So that's why, over the years, our machines have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and reached up to higher and higher energies in order to create particles of higher and higher masses. Now that might seem slightly counterintuitive, but if we look down at the low energy scale, we get our... everyday objects, and in fact up here at sort of 10 MeV, which is like a sort of everyday energy scale, are the up and s where our s and s are created from. And if we go up in energy scale, we slowly... over time discovered all these other types of s and s, and all these other things that seem to play no role in our everyday lives."

"And if you go up and up and up and up, we understand how the different forces in the universe work, from electromagnetism to the strong and weak nuclear force, and then finally right at the top we get to this Higgs thing, which is the theory behind why all of the other particles in the Standard Model have a ."

"[I]nside the atom there are only... three different types of particles, which are the up and s, they're the constituents of s and s inside the atom, and the electron. Everything else there plays very little role in our day-to-day lives. But over about the last century we've discovered that all of these particles fit together in a neat theory that describes our universe to something like 9 or 10 decimal places. It is an incredible amount of discovery and work that's gone into it, and I cannot do it justice in... two minutes. But the latest piece that we've discovered using the Large Hadron Collider, and one of the reasons, but not the only reason that it was built, was to discover... the Higgs boson."

"The amazing thing about this collection of particles, which admittedly looks arbitrary until you learn it in more detail, is that you can take the entire description of every known particle and interaction, other than gravity, in the universe, and write it down on a mug."

"[T]his is called the Standard Model Lagrangian, that curly \mathcal{L} at the start is for Lagrangian... and there's lots of different components of that. Now if I write it out in full, I get what is the most egotistical physics teacher in the entire world. So if I wrote it out in full... really you don't need to read it, I promise, all of the different terms in that equation describe an interaction between different types of particles and force carriers..."

"Has anyone heard of a particle accelerator other than the Large Hadron Collider? ...We actually have two at Harwell... If you were pushed, could you give a back of the envelope explanation of how a particle accelerator works?"

"Most people now, when I say particle accelerator, think of... the bohemoth. This is the . It is almost 27 km in circumference, which is why the tunnel looks almost straight. It's about 100 meters underground, over the border between France and Switzerland. ...Inside these magnets here, these big blue long ones it's one of the coldest places in the universe at 1.9°K above . ...[I]t accelerates two beams of s, from inside the atom, in opposite directions at 99.99999% (that's the exact number) of the speed of light and smashes them into each other... [I]t is what I like to call an impressive shiny huge piece of kit that's bigger than everyone else's!"

"What I'm going to talk about today is the fascinating world, and I really think it's wonderful, of particle accelerators."

"This... is only one in the world... there are actually about 35,000 of them..."

"I will leave you with some photographs of some of the places that my career in physics has taken me so far, and I hope to add many more to this list in the future."

"So that's 5 things you should never do with a particle accelerator. Thank you."

"So why was that particular one built? ...I don't have time to give you a crash course in particle physics. Are there any particle physicist in the room..? No, I'm safe. It's fine, okay. No, I used to be one, and then I switched fields."

"So my name's Suzie. I'm a physicist... an accelerator physicist, and I work at the University of Oxford. I run a research group there in... high intensity s... I... spend half my time at Harwell campus... I'm also a member of the , not the other ISIS, just to be clear."