University Of Oxford Alumni

"Around 75m years since a mighty intergalactic leader somehow triggered the existence of today's Scientologists, the interests of their religion and the rest of humanity seem finally to have aligned: in shared devotion to Tom Cruise."

"Who are strangers to comment on a would-be parent exercising what is increasingly claimed, even if it requires the bodies of others, to be a right? Or on the choices of a surrogate mother, also assumed to be a free agent? It remains a mystery why the choice to gestate a stranger's child is almost never, if ever, taken by the richest 1%."

"To be fair to the more entitled, self-pitying and tone-deaf representatives of the professional managerial class, there has probably never been a worse time to explain why you have an inalienable right to, say, a second home."

"With hindsight, we can see that if Cook's loyalty to his facial hair did not actively foreshadow his later determination to stick to his principles, it was, in the intervening years, a sign that some important part of him would never be a smooth, New Labour man. While Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, Alistair Darling and Geoff Hoon all recognised that hairiness is inescapably associated with woolly, unreconstructed leftiness, Cook stayed firm. After he completed his speech on Monday night, he sank back into a veritable hedge of springy backbench furze, a brigade of hedgehogs led by Jeremy Corbyn and Frank Dobson, whose beards, now that Cook's has joined their number, are recognisable as individual acts of in-your-face defiance. In fact, with this week's principled resignation from the shadow front bench of the only bearded Tory, John Randall, New Labour's Tebbit-like suspicion of hairy ministers ought to become, if anything, more intense. While Blunkett's beard is explicable, there must now be suspicions that Charles Clarke's stubble is nothing less than a signal to disobedient backbenchers that he will not be long in joining them. Resignation or the razor, Clarke; the time has come to choose."

"Disastrous in every other respect, the recent revival of Etonian premierships did have a solitary benefit: a related succession of damning memoirs and studies of and by Etonians. When combined with the staggering failures of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, they conveyed one overwhelming message: the threat from this school is enough to justify some targeted form of vetting. It was ignored, of course, and the result is Kwasi Kwarteng. If additional checks seem extreme, it has become clear that a general and well-founded suspicion of Eton, the academy also known as charity 1139086, offers the public little protection from its faultier products, partly because it considers them the flower of its system."

"How well it still works. The advancement of Etonians by Etonians, as if to compensate for the lost years of grammar school premiers, became so normalised after 2010 that it was never addressed as an actual scandal – as it might have been had the fraternity been exposed as freemasons, or ex-miners, or members of the same betting syndicate."

"As Mrs Blair never speaks in public other than about solemn matters, far removed from personal grooming, the only reason we know about [beautician Bharti] Vyas's handiwork must be because Vyas is apt to mention it. So much so that these days Vyas's name is rarely to be found, in her extensive media appearances, without some reference to that ultimate respectability-clincher, Mrs Blair's patronage. Is it possible to imagine a more compelling recommendation for a miracle-worker such as Vyas, a woman who believes that drinking "magnetised water" can "help control", among other things, cholesterol levels, obesity and hay fever? While, a few years back, the patronage of the Duchess of York would instantly confirm to any right-thinking woman the idiocy of whatever she touched, the invocation of Mrs Blair's name has precisely the opposite effect. If Mrs Blair, as the duchess once did, went and sat on a stool beneath a home-made pyramid, we should remark on the impressive, if unproven results of regular pyramid-shelter, rather than speculate on the mental agility of the sitter."

"If Labour’s responses to its woman problem (as [[Rosie Duffield|[Rosie] Duffield]] rightly calls it) can never compete with Tate's videos, its progressive approach to misogyny is arguably more instructive for men who would like to shut women up but cannot afford a Romania-based chick compound. Men who study, for instance, the conduct of Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle may even conclude that the manosphere could have done more to nurture, as he does, male belief that bullying and insulting women is indicative of moral superiority. For Russell-Moyle, when he brought himself to apologise for insulting and intimidating Miriam Cates MP (having previously barracked Duffield in the debate about the government’s section 35 order blocking Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill), the aggression only confirmed the purity of his sentiments."

"Repeated arguments for a much edited or secular coronation, citing dwindling Christian belief as well as protagonists less obviously creditable than was Elizabeth in 1953, appear to have dented neither the church's coronation ambitions nor the palace’s matching enthusiasm for spiritual choreography and knick-knacks. Only the Koh-i-noor has been sacrificed, to be sensitively replaced at the religious ceremony by the largest diamond in the world, the South African Cullinan. With decorative crosses over them, such jewels "remind us", the prayerbook explains to the untutored, "that Jesus Christ is king over all"."

"The Government spokesmen...insist that, once the assembly is established, the SNP will wither away... Thanks to the assembly, Scotch nationalism will have been scotched. The leaders of the SNP do not agree with this reasoning. If they did, they would oppose the assembly as an unacceptable substitute for their own essential demands, a stone offered instead of bread. In fact they have decided to vote for the assembly, confident that they can use it as a stepping-stone towards their own objective. For after all, they can say, the opportunities of making trouble in the assembly will be many. There can be disputes over the spending of the money, disputes over the restraints on the assembly, both political and financial. Even practical incompetence can be useful; for in every case the blame can be concentrated on a very convenient scapegoat, the reserved powers of Westminster. In this way the assembly, which has been devised to halt the advance of the SNP, will be an excellent means of accelerating that advance: an advance far beyond the limited aims of the government: an advance to sovereignty."

"To this the government reply is, in effect, "wait and see". We are assured that once the sensible Scots people have elected sensible, practical men to represent them in the assembly, all these grim forebodings will prove mistaken. The assembly-men will settle down and make good laws within the limits set, and the claims of the SNP will dissolve in mere noise."

"The Regius Professor's methods of quotation might also do harm to his reputation as a serious historian, if he had one."

"England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus."

"Scotland had already had a religious revolution. By an irony which seems also a law of history, the new religion of Calvinism, like Marxism today, had triumphed not in the mature society which had bred it but in undeveloped countries where the organs of resistance to it were also undeveloped."

"After that date [1707], intelligent Scotchmen rejoiced in the removal of their national politics to London. That enabled them to get on with the long delayed improvement of their country which, till then, had remained, as they admitted, "the rudest of all the European nations". In the eighteenth century, the energy which had hitherto been wasted or frustrated in futile politics was devoted to "improvement" and the rudest of its nations became the admired model of Europe."

"Like seventeenth century visitors to Scotland, they [English historians] tend to dismiss it as a barbarous country populated only by doltish peasants manipulated, for their own factious ends, by ambitious noblemen and fanatical ministers. And equally, they see the English occupation of Scotland merely as imposed, for the sake of order, on an exhausted land. Even Scottish historians have hardly sought to fill this gap. As far as published work is concerned, the sociology of seventeenth Scotland remains a blank."

"It amuses me to hear some of my Scotch friends, who have leapt nimbly on to the new band-wagon, speaking as if, with independence, Scotland would be the same as before, only independent. Will it even be as large as before? The native historian of the Orkney Islands closes his work with the remark that the only advantage that the Orkney islanders gained from their annexation by Scotland in 1468 was "the ultimate advantage of annexation to Great Britain" in 1707. They may well prefer to be ruled by London rather than from Glasgow, to which political power in an independent Scotland will naturally gravitate, and where it will no doubt be exercised—since they too are good at that kind of politics—by the Irish. This will perhaps compensate them for their inability to rule the Scots of Ulster from captured Belfast."

"Now this doctrine of Carlyle, which the history of Nazism so aptly illustrates, depends upon two premisses of doubtful validity: firstly, that "greatness", or any other merely abstract conception, is desirable; secondly, that the human character is constant,—for a great man can clearly be trusted with absolute power only if his qualities remain "great". The opposite doctrine to this is the doctrine summarised by Lord Acton in his famous aphorism, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely": the doctrine that power is not merely the effective expression of a fixed character, but can affect and alter the character which exercises it. The history of Nazism suggests that this doctrine is true."

"I used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes. I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx."

"Courtesy of the Daily Mail, Johnson has just accepted the position of "newspaper columnist", an extremely silly job, which in large part involves implying you'd do it better if only they'd give you a turn running the country. As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, surely we have tested the central premise of that one to destruction."

"For a certain type of mournfully uncool man on the left, Russell Brand was quite the excitement. You only had to watch their little faces in his presence – lit up at being fleetingly indulged by the kind of guy who would probably have bullied them at school."

"And with my 2023 head on, rather sickening alarm bells began to ring, because I knew – I knew – that I wouldn't have centred anything I wrote about it on Georgina Baillie. ... Dear 2008 Marina: you think you’re being clever but you’re being horribly obtuse. Get your head out of your arse. It doesn't matter whether or not they heard it, it’s still hideous and they have every right to think it’s absolutely unacceptable for the BBC to have aired it."

"[B]oth the previous two prime ministers – Truss and Boris Johnson – are at this game. We live in an era where people who have got all the way to the highest office in the land now hilariously claim structural discrimination against the fact that, after varying amounts of time, they just weren't good enough. When both of these chancers left office, they had not simply passed their best-before date – they had sailed beyond the use-by date and moved formally into the realms of biohazard. Yet instead of bucking the f up and accepting this, they have turned into the political equivalent of "incels" – involuntarily rejected by the people who determine whether or not you get to be prime minister, and bleating about it in self-reflection-free style on every available forum."

"The rapturous standing ovation at the end of Liz Truss’s conference speech looked straight out of a future Netflix documentary from the cults strand. Outside the sect’s meeting hall, the party is polling an average of 25 (TWENTY-FIVE) points behind Labour. Inside, the people were clapping like they’d just heard a really charismatic argument about why it’s important to marry teenage girls, shun dissenting family members, and build gun turrets round their compound. Truss’s government is now too weak to implement its maddest plans and too ideological to implement its most sensible. Last night it emerged that the government has blocked a public information campaign to help people save money on energy – and, by extension, to conserve usage in the face of suggestions that rolling blackouts could be in the post for this winter. Apparently Truss regarded it as too nannying, despite it having been drawn up by her own business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg (a 53-year-old who admittedly still has a nanny). One cabinet minister reportedly said "the public is smarter than you think". Unfortunately, Liz Truss isn’t. If we do reach the blackout scenario, the failure to plan or use foresight will be blamed on Vladimir Putin."

"Yet discounting the minority of republicans, British public opinion appears to have divided the king and queen consort and his sons and their wives into two categories: "obviously tortured and damaged and miserable but enduring it for their whole lives out of duty" (good) and "obviously tortured and damaged and miserable but saying so out loud and at length" (bad). What a sad state of affairs that all seems, though it’s always amusing to read frothing online comments from people whose personal understanding of duty extends to the tax on booze. Above all, this epochal saga reminds us that there is more than one way to look at that chilling term for the monarchy, "the institution". We might pity the institution’s inmates and escapees, or be horrified by them, or turn a blind eye to the inherent coldnesses and cruelties of their existence. But we are, at the dawn of 2023, part of the society where the majority thinks that it’s probably the best place for them."

"I am mortified to see I reacted to this by saying she should stop banging on about the whole thing."

"Liz Truss is now eluded by two major types of growth: economic and personal. The past few days have seen the former prime minister break her welcome silence with what her allies call a series of "interventions". The one intervention that doesn’t seem to have happened is the type where they sit you down and give you the hard truths about your behaviour. That treatment oversight has resulted in a spectacle of lavishly preposterous blame-shifting and self-delusion."

"Georgina, Georgina, Georgina... In the name of all human sanity: please just let it go. They were total scumbags, but it's over. O-V-A-H."

"Before we go any further, I'm warned that any criticism of Assange will land me in the doghouse with those somehow still able to take him 100% seriously, and may even cause a section of commentators to suspect I am part of some Guardian plot against him. The reality is a thousand times less intriguing, alas, and may even land me in the doghouse with the Guardian."

"And so to Sweden, a country Assange regarded as so perilously likely to FedEx him to the US that he travelled there frequently until he was accused of rape in it."

"Entitled "My View", it sees the Satanic Slut attempt to gain some sort of purchase on this latest Jonathan Ross "outrage", the details of which I literally cannot be bothered to even look up, let alone confect horror over. The world can now be divided into people who genuinely think caring about this crap is important, and people you might wish to know socially."

"You know, almost every time I've ever written about Richard Branson over the years, he or one of his lackeys has written in to the Guardian to whine about it, and often got the letter printed. This time, I'm actively begging him to get in touch. Come on, Richard – write in and tell us why you didn't bother Googling why your friend with the best lawyers out there still got an 18-month prison sentence, and had, at the time of that email, settled many widely reported civil lawsuits brought against him by victims? I'll save you a space on the letters page."

"I don't really care for the phrase "sowing division" as far as [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]] is concerned. "Sowing" implies a sort of precision to the planting, when in fact Galloway just sprays division around like some porphyric roué who can't be bothered to find the urinal."

"A cosmological argument is an argument to the existence of God from the existence of some finite object or, more specifically, a complex physical universe. There have been many versions of the cosmological argument given over the past two-and-a-half millennia; the most quoted are the second and third of Aquinas’s five ways to show the existence of God. However, Aquinas’s ‘five ways’, or rather the first four of his five ways, seem to me to be one of his least successful pieces of philosophy. In my view the two most persuasive and interesting versions of the cosmological argument are that given by Leibniz in his paper On the Ultimate Origination of Things, and that given by his contemporary Samuel Clarke in his Boyle Lectures for 1704 and published under the title A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes to God. The former seems to be the argument criticized by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason and the latter the argument criticized by Hume in the Dialogues."

"The starting points of cosmological arguments are evident facets of experience. There is no doubt about the truth of statements that report that they hold. It seems to me equally evident that no argument from any of such starting points to the existence of God is deductively valid. For, if an argument from, for example, the existence of a complex physical universe to the existence of God were deductively valid, then it would be incoherent to assert that a complex physical universe exists and God does not exist. There would be a hidden contradiction buried in such co-assertions. Now, the only way to prove a proposition to be incoherent is to deduce from it an obviously incoherent proposition (for example, a self-contradictory proposition),but, notoriously, attempts to derive obviously incoherent propositions from such co-assertions have failed through the commission of some elementary logical error. Furthermore, it seems easy enough to spell out in an obviously coherent way one way in which such a co-assertion would be true. There would be a complex physical universe and no God, if there had always been matter rearranging itself in various combinations, and the only persons had been embodied persons; if there never was a person who knew everything, or could do everything, etc. Atheism does seem to be a supposition consistent with the existence of a complex physical universe, such as our universe. Of course things may not be as they seem, but, in the absence of any worthwhile argument to the contrary known to me, I shall assume that the non-existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of the universe, and so that the cosmological argument is not a valid, and so not a good, deductive argument. Our primary concern is however to investigate whether it is a good C-inductive or P-inductive argument, and just how much force it has."

"I thus understand by a «theodicy» not an account of God’s actual reasons for allowing a bad state to occur, but an account of his possible reasons"

"My main concern...was education standards... By early 1986 I had become even more convinced of the importance of this issue after reading Correlli Barnett's newly published book, The Audit of War, which impressively documented the British educational failure stretching back into the last century, and linked it persuasively with the reasons for our disappointing economic performance over that period, with particularly ominous implications for the future."

"Barnett is not giving a recipe for a free market and there is no mention of Hayek's (1944) warning about the state in The Road to Serfdom. What he appears to think ought to have happened can only be imagined on the basis of a much more powerful central direction, much less deferential to public opinion... The alternative implied here is that of Bismarck's State, which so many British educational reformers admired, with a specific industrial policy and close involvement in the scientific, education, transport and energy infrastructure—the remit given to the state by Oswald Mosley in 1931 and which Mussolini and Salazar attempted to implement. Whether, even under such a regime, Britain could have remained competitive vis-à-vis the United States, Germany and Japan is unlikely; that the electorate would have stood for it, inconceivable. But the Bismarckian state kept the unions and the public in their places: and, Barnett implies, Britain's soft democratic system ought to share the blame with the utopian intellectuals."

"In a series of brilliant books Correlli Barnett has made the case against the English élite and its education, telling us that the ethos, curriculum and lifestyle of the public schools and the collegiate universities did little or nothing to prepare the English for the great conflicts of our time. The ideal of the gentleman, with its emphasis on fair play and honesty, left the English at a disadvantage in the struggle against calculating and cynical forces. The classical curriculum put the modern world at too remote a distance from the scholar who had absorbed it; the downgrading of science and technology meant the English were beset by a crippling nostalgia, which caused them to gothicise their industry and surround it with feudal prohibitions. The education instilled by the public schools and the old colleges was, in Barnett's words, not a preparation for the world but an inoculation against it. All such criticisms are based on a mistaken view of education. Relevance in education is a chimerical objective and the English knew this. Who is to guess what will be relevant to a student's interests in ten years' time? Even in the applied sciences, it is not relevance that forms and transforms the curriculum, but knowledge. A relevant technology is one that is relevant to us, here, now. To concentrate on teaching such a technology is to ensure that we remain locked in techniques that will soon be useless."

"It's easy with hindsight to see all those years before and after the war as wasted. I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter. I believe that managements, helped by trade unions and helped by governments, were not nearly effective enough."

"Correlli Barnett was another reputable author whose work was pilfered. "I'm a Correlli Barnett supporter", Keith Joseph affirmed in his 1987 interview with Anthony Seldon. In his follow-up question Seldon qualified this: "You are partly a Correlli Barnett man". This showed that the interviewer, at least, had read Barnett's work carefully. In a series of scholarly books and articles Barnett argued that Britain's economic decline could be traced back to an anti-business culture whose foundations were laid by an education system which had been shaped by the model of the public school. Joseph was living evidence that Barnett's theory did not invariably hold good, and indeed some of his detailed points have been criticised. There was a further problem in that Barnett was in no sense an economic liberal; the state, he felt, had not intervened enough in industry. But these minor details did not deter Joseph. Barnett had written that British power collapsed because of a pervasive anti-business culture, and for Joseph that was quite enough to make the historian "one of us". Barnett recognised the differences of principle which Joseph overlooked, but the connection proved useful to him in the 1980s, when Sir Keith and Lord Young encouraged him to put his ideas on vocational training into practice."

"[T]here has been widespread reaction, partly ideological, partly based simply on scrutiny of primary sources, against what Cannadine has called the "welfare state triumphalism" of much post-Second World War British historiography. The ideological wing of this reaction—incapsulated par excellence in Correlli Barnett's The Audit of War (1986)—has questioned not the substance of the established view that the war precipitated the welfare state but its wider implications. Barnett takes direct issue with the Titmuss approach by suggesting that the atmosphere of sentimental and uncritical moral solidarity induced by the war gave rise to wholly unrealistic, Utopian expectations of a post-war world (governed by deficit-finance, job security, comprehensive welfare and indifference to economic consequences) that led inexorably to Britain's post-war economic decline."

"If we examine the complaints made by Barnett, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that they contain no comparative judgement. Set beside which élite did the English élite fail so badly? In which country of the modern world do we find the educational system which compares so favourably with the English college? Which European nations, unhampered by the code of the gentleman, have shown us the way to successful empire building and retreated with credit from their colonies? All such comparisons point to the amazing success of the English. By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful. And by internalising the code of honour they did not, as Barnett supposes, make themselves defenceless in a world of chicanery and crime, but endowed themselves with the only real defence that human life can offer – the instinctive trust between strangers, which enables them in whatever dangerous circumstances to act together as a team. It was not only the battle of Waterloo that was won on the playing fields of Eton: the entire imperial adventure was settled there."

"Dr Correlli Barnett was the first scholar to point out the extent to which, by 1945, Britain had become totally dependent on the United States for its economic survival, let alone its military victory—a dependence that reduced it virtually to satellite status; but this dependence he attributed, rightly or wrongly, not to any mistaken policy pursued by the British government of the day, but to an entire culture that for half a century past had emphasized domestic welfare at the expense of military power."

"[I]t was the young pilots of Fighter Command who passed into British myth as "The Few" who outfought vast German airfleets. Today, 70 years on, we can acknowledge that the young men in the Messerschmitts were just as gallant, high-spirited and skilful. But whereas the German pilots were fighting for a hideous tyrant in the delusion that they were patriotically defending the Fatherland, the pilots of Fighter Command were modern-day Spartans, holding the pass for the free world against the barbarian. They included volunteers from the British Dominions overseas, from countries under Nazi occupation such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, and even a handful from neutral America."

"Barnett is no Thatcherite: he does not suppose that a return to laissez-faire in 1945 would have wrought an economic miracle. On the contrary, he believes the Churchill coalition ought to have developed a coherent industrial strategy... Barnett is a joyful debunker of patriotic myth, but not, of course, from a left-wing standpoint. He is probably the only modern British historian whose creed is Bismarckian nationalism. His admiration for the German nation-state, through every stage of its development from 1870 to the present day, is the most prominent theme in the book. There are glowing passages, which make one pause, on the productivity of German industry under the Nazis. No trade-union agitators there, no socialists or liberal softies putting a spanner in the works! The occasional admiring references to the United States do little to modify the teutonic feel of the book. Barnett is, in fact, the heir of Sir John Seeley, the Late Victorian prophet of a federal British Empire, whose admiration for Prussia led him to the conviction that Britain must develop along the same lines or perish as a great power."

"Depressed, shaken by Correlli Barnett's The Collapse of British Power."

"As I can remember, as a schoolboy in south London, there was no dismay among my family and their friends at the sight of contorted vapour trails high over us as Fighter Command and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the blue summer sky – only a sense of excitement. Looking back now as a historian, it is clear to me that in 1940 the British nation was blessed by an inner certainty that, just as the Navy had seen off Philip II of Spain in 1588 and Napoleon in 1805, so now the Royal Air Force and the Navy together would see off that funny little man with the toothbrush moustache and his fat chum in the gawdy uniform covered in medals. In that certainty, there was truly an element of the heroic."

"On the return flight...the PM [Margaret Thatcher] invited me to sit at her table... I was interested and gratified to hear her pass a comment showing that she had read The Audit of War."

""Niceness", the desire "to do the decent thing" – these qualities constituted then, and still constitute today, the emotional essence of small 'l' liberalism. They are qualities desirable in a friend, a neighbour or a colleague, and admirable in the citizen of a democracy. But they serve ill as a guide to a nation's total strategy in a ruthless world of struggle. The dominance of these qualities over the British public mind and feelings therefore accounts more than any other factor for the contrast between British power in 1918 and British power in 1956. For the desire to be "nice" and "do the decent thing" lay at the heart of "appeasement", whether of dictators in the 1930s or trade unions in the 1940s and 1950s; it explains why the British saw their colonial empire as a trust, a civilising mission, rather than as a resource to be exploited if profitable, and dumped if not; it explains why the British saw the Commonwealth and the Sterling Area – indeed, world affairs in general – in terms of altruistic responsibility rather than of self-interested calculation. And it was this same desire to be "nice" and "do the decent thing", rather than a resolve to improve the competitive quality of Britain's human resources, which provided the inspiration behind "New Jerusalem"."