University Of Oxford Alumni

"Welsh politics were extremely volatile, even by medieval standards, with almost constant fighting between rival ruling dynasties, and an occasional tendency to spill across the border into England."

"William’s reign did indeed prove to be long, but it was far from peaceful. While he wore the crown, England experienced greater and more seismic change than at any point before or since.…The old ruling elite of England were swept away in their thousands and replaced by continental newcomers, who spoke a different language and had very different views about the way society should be ordered."

"Thanks to the Domesday Book, we know more about eleventh-century England than any other medieval society anywhere in the world."

"Spending faster than it comes, Beating waiters, bailiffs, duns, Bacchus' true-begotten sons, Live the rakes of Mallow."

"A man of more varied talents than Lysaght it was impossible to meet. In his personal character he was a thorough Irishman—brave, brilliant, witty, eloquent, and devil-may-care. He was a capital song-writer; his poems are full of that indescribable animal buoyancy which is a chief essence of Irish genius. He had a flow of exuberant spirits; his gaiety was like the laugh of matchless Mrs. Nisbett, an infallible cure for the blue devils, a potent destroyer of spleen."

"He was acting as second...to Deane Grady, in a duel between the latter and Counsellor O'Maher. O'Maher's second, during the preliminaries, drew Lysaght's attention to the fact that his pistol was cocked. "Take care, Mr. Lysaght, your pistol is cocked." "Well, then," says Pleasant Ned, "cock yours, and let me take a slap at you, as we are idle.""

"While he was living in college, there were two sprigs of nobility there, who made themselves ridiculous. These were the two sons of Lord Norbury, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. Lord Norbury had married the heiress of the Norwood estates, and while he was serving the office of Attorney-General, he had influence enough to get his wife made Viscountess Norwood in her own right, with remainder to her second son. In the course of time, John Toler, the Attorney-General, was himself raised to the peerage as Lord Norbury, his eldest son, of course, succeeding him in the title. Many were the mistakes about the two Hon. Messrs. Toler; the future Norwood being often confounded with the future Norbury, and vice versa. The thing was more ridiculous, as the Toler family had no aristocratic pretensions. Lysaght, one day meeting the two young, conceited Tolers, in the square of the college, went up to them and said—"Pray tell me which is which? Which of you is Bogberry, and which of you is Bogwood?" The semi-plebeian filii nobiles by no means relished the allusion to bogs."

"What has always filled me with wonder is the assurance with which many historical linguists assign a date to their reconstructed proto-language. . . . We are told that proto-Indo- European was spoken about 6,000 years ago. What is know with a fair degree of certainty is the time between proto-Indo-Aryan and the modern Inclo-Aryan languages—something in the order of 3,000 years. But how can anyone tell that the development from proto- Indo-European to proto-Indo-Aryan took another 3,000 years? . . . Languages are known to change at different rates. There is no way of knowing how long it took to go from the presumed homogeneity of proto-Indo-European to the linguistic diversity of proto-Indo- Iranian, proto-Celtic, proto-Germanic, etc. The changes could have been rapid or slow. We simply don't know. . . .Why couldn't proto-lndo-European have been spoken about 10,500 years ago? . . . The received opinion of a date of around 6000 BP for proto-Indo- European . . . is an ingrained one. I have found this a difficult matter to get specialists to even discuss. Yet it does seem to be a house of cards. (47-49)"

"Poetry and pistols, wine and women."

"He sows no vile dissensions; good-will to all he bears; He knows no vain pretensions, no paltry fears or cares; To Erin's and to Britain's sons his worth his name endears; They love the man, who led the van of Irish Volunteers."

"The return of the s to nest successfully on a Scots fir on in 1959 marked the beginning of a remarkable record of success by the in osprey protection. The osprey, handsome, inoffensive, living entirely on fish, nested in Scotland 100 years ago."

"Mr. Seton Gordon is one of the few men of education who have been content to live their life in the rather than earn what many would consider to be an easier and better living elsewhere. The result is that, being a life-long observer, he knows more about the of a remote region than almost anyone else. He has preferred to diffuse his wide knowledge in the form of popular books rather than as systematic papers, a fact for which many general readers are undoubtedly thankful. We of a younger generation of workers may be sorry that he does not give us a or which he alone could write and which would preserve for us the great variety of knowledge which his sensitive, inquiring mind has gathered."

"Beyond , we passed the mouth of Glen Beg, where the last of the great had his farm."

"For the lover of the grand in nature the mountains have singular fascination. The children of the mountain, too—the stern and impassive and the gentle —seem to have instilled into them the true spirit of the mist, and thus appeal to the nature lover more forcibly than the denizens of less romantic regions. The mountains attract at every season of the year—in winter, when their corries are buried deep under their snowy covering; in spring, when this snowy mantle has been broken by the strengthening sun, aided by soft breezes from the south; and in summer, when an occasional snowfield lingering here and there still reminds one of the winter that is past, but when the corries are clothed with grass of an exquisite green."

"The ', a true mountain dweller, is sometimes the golden eagle's prey. On the I have frequently seen an eagle chasing, in play, a covey or pack of ptarmigan, and seeming to find satisfaction in the bewildering and aimless flight of the terrified birds."

"I think it is possible to tell, by the flight of and , whether they are seeking to escape their hereditary enemy, the eagle, or their more recent but much more deadly enemy, man. As a general rule, when the eagle is the cause of disturbance the grouse fly at a greater height above ground and their flight is more precipitate and aimless than when man is the cause of alarm. It is of interest to realise how strong is the hereditary instinct of dread felt towards the eagle, and in obedience to this instinct grouse will cheerfully face in great numbers a whole line of guns which must spell death to them, rather than approach the locality where the eagle has been spied. I was travelling on the recently, from to , and just at the county march, where the line borders on the 1500 feet level, I saw a grouse cross the line above the train, flying high and with a distinctive rocking flight. I was almost certain that an eagle, and not the Highland express, was the cause of alarm, and sure enough, on looking out of the opposite window, I saw the enemy there sailing far off above the top of a neighbouring hill."

"Many a time I have sat up all night to take notes on the , which, in this part of the world, commence to sing considerably earlier than their English relations. In June, the and are often in song before 2 o'clock a.m., while the s and s by the river never cease to call all night long."

"... is the home of rare s, one of which, ', is found nowhere else in Britain. Although rare birds are protected by , rare plants have no protection afforded them, perhaps because such protection would be impossible to enforce."

"There is no native population in , for no s, es, or even s, have ever settled there. Three hundred years ago the bays and seas of West Spitsbergen were a favourite whale-fishing ground to which most of the seafaring nations of Europe sent fleets of s, but the " " is long extinct in Spitsbergen waters, and the whaling industry has now disappeared. Spitsbergen was discovered by the Dutch in 1596; whales were found by in 1607, and by 1620 the whale-hunting was at its height."

"The new discoveries of the earliest age of Greece are chiefly associated with the name of , and rightly so, as his work first revealed prehistoric Greece to us. But since his time a totally new face has been given to our knowledge by the Cretan discoveries of and , which has rendered out of date all books on the general subject published before 1902. The now prehistooric Greece is very different from the old one of the two decades succeeding Schliemann’s discoveries. He, however, was the pioneer, and his finds explained various ieolaied discoveries made before his time, chiefly of vases, which it had been impossible to bring into any intelligible relation with our knowledge of the relics of classical antiquity. Best known to us of these are perhaps the vases of in , presented to the by in 1870."

"In spite of the fact that one knew it all beforehand as an Englishman would to whom India in picture and by hearsay was familiar from childhood, who had played with brass s and had broken gilt alabaster s and s and s (with dire corporeal results) before he donned , it was strange to me to realize the fact of the actual worship of Ganesa and Siva and Vishnu in their own land in the temples of their cults at , as strange as if I were to find and still venerated in some Egyptian temple such as or . Egypt and her gods and priests all alive, mixed up with London; with the , , , the , and the : that was the impression I gained of Bombay. There was no doubt of the specifically English (not merely European) impression, and the combination is extraordinary. I felt I loved better Egypt, where the old gods are safely dead and their lore can be studied by such as I without impossible modern contaminations and antinomies, where the ; now calls uncontradicted the simple praises of the One, where the clean desert air breathes health, not septic soddenness, and where one is not likely nowadays to find an - in one’s bed."

"When sat on the throne of the Pharaohs and it became fashionable to inquire into the past history of the extraordinary country which had been brought willy-nilly within the pale of Hellenism, a learned priest named , "The Gift of " (Manethoth), or possibly "The Gift of " (Manutjo), of in the , was commissioned by to collect all that was known of the Egyptian annals and translate them into Greek as Αἰγυπτιαϰὰ. This was done, and until the discoveries of Manetho's work, half destroyed as it now is, imitated and garbled by generations of ignorant copyists, was, with the exception of the sketches by Herodotus and , the sole Egyptian authority on the history of Egypt. A similar rôle with regard to the history of Mesopotamia was played by the work of a Babylonian priest named , who is said to have been a contemporary of (250 B.C.). ... Like that of Manetho, his work is only known to us through the labours of copyists and compilers."

"The present energy of the archaeologist in Greece and the modern interest in early Greek archaeology date from and are a consequence of the epoch-making discoveries of the beginning of the XIXth century in the domain of Egyptian and Oriental archaeology. A new world was opened to us by these discoveries; the horizon of our knowledge of the ancient civilizations of the earth was widened indefinitely by them; and it was not long before classical students began, after much doubt and incredulity, to ask themselves how far this new knowledge might bear upon the early . But not all: many classical scholars were utterly unable to conform themselves to the new order of ideas. The keen intellect of , for instance, was unable to grasp the meaning of the new discoveries; he continued to the end of his days refusing to believe that anybody could read a single or interpret a single group of ."

"It is, I have been told, one of the most formidable of Chinese imprecations to wish that your enemy lived "in interesting times." We live in very interesting times; times not to be made better by any simple formula. Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning."

"A country has the kind of army its total ethos, its institutions, resources, habits of peaceful life, make possible to it. The American army is the army of a country which is law-respecting without being law-abiding. It is the army of a country which, having lavish natural wealth provided for it and lavish artificial wealth created by its own efforts, is extravagant and wasteful. It is the army of a country in which melodramatic pessimism is often on the surface but below it is the permanent optimism of a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America. It is the army of a country whose national motto has been "root, hog, or die." When convinced that death is the alternative, the hog roots."

"For Americans, war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis—an American decision that this war is sport, or that it is business."

"American social fences have to be continually repaired; in England they are like wild hedges; they grow if left alone."

"The combination of a profound hatred of war and militarism with an innocent delight in playing soldiers is one of these apparent contradictions of American life that one has to accept."

"If we are to consider what holds the South back from the modern world in so graceless and often base a way, we must allow for the survival of the Confederate legend. This legend is now less an heroic memory than poison in the blood; it recalls less Chancellorsville, or even Nashville, than Oxford, Mississippi, with Ross Barnett as the poor man's Jefferson Davis."

"The basic Canadian relationship is not either with the United States or with the United Kingdom, but with the world of the hydrogen bomb. The very fact that Canada is now one of the treasure-houses of the world makes the naive isolationism of the inter-war years...impossible. A uranium-producing country cannot be neutral."

"We all invent ourselves as we go along, and a great man's myths about himself merely tend to stick better than most."

"After the Civil War any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats."

"At their parting they use to say, Merry meet merry part, and that before they are carried to their meetings, their Foreheads are anointed with greenish Oyl that they have from the Spirit which smells raw. They for the most part are carried in the Air. As they pass, they say, Thout, tout a tout, tout, throughout and about. Passing back they say, Rentum Tormentum, and another word which she doth not remember."

"Though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility; there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry."

"The indisputable Mathematicks, the only Science Heaven hath yet vouchsaft Humanity, have but few Votaries among the slaves of the Stagirite."

"The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith; and Faith is an Act of Reason."

"Time as a River, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial; while things more solid and substantial have been immersed."

"The precipitancy of disputation, and the stir and noise of Passions, that usually attend it, must needs be prejudicial to Verity."

"For Mathematical Sciences, he that doubts their certainty, hath need of a dose of Hellebore."

"The Understanding also hath its Idiosyncrasies, as well as other faculties."

"We cannot conceive how the Fœtus is form'd in the Womb, nor as much as how a Plant springs from the Earth we tread on; we know not how our Souls move the Body, nor how these distant and extream natures are united: ... And if we are ignorant of the most obvious things about us, and the most considerable within our selves, 'tis then no wonder that we know not the constitution and powers of the Creatures, to whom we are such strangers."

"At their parting they say [A Boy! merry meet, merry part.]"

"The knowledge we have of the Mathematicks, hath no reason to elate us; since by them we know but numbers, and figures, creatures of our own, and are yet ignorant of our Maker's."

"The Sages of old live again in us; and in opinions there is a Metempsychosis."

"The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden."

"A man walking down from to passes the . If it is the evening, a dramatic performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a tragedy, or some form of comedy. If it is a musical comedy and he enters, he will see elaborate scenery and a play which may open with a prologue and which is partly composed of dialogue between the various characters, partly of songs in various sung by a chorus to the accompaniment of an orchestra. As the words in italics indicate, our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home."

"has nearly four million square miles ; has 1,700 ; has 700. Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we, with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps, but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history—these are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools. Roman orators learnt their trade from Greek rhetoricians. Roman proconsuls on their way to the East stopped to spend a few days talking to the successors of Plato and Aristotle in the and . Roman aristocrats imported Greek philosophers to live in their families."

"Ages are not taken at their own valuation by posterity, and the achievements which they view with most complacency often appear to their successors negligible or even ridiculous. It was so in Greece. Aeschylus expected to be remembered not as a poet, but as a combatant at . speaks as if the greatness of Athens lay in its empire. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Whole epochs which were well satisfied with themselves are found in the sequel to matter nothing to the world, and to have made no contribution to its progress. Two hundred years hence our own age may be regarded as one that possessed, for its time, considerable material civilization but very little else, a substantial body and a soul which died from fatty degeneration,"

"Greek and Roman religion depended on images, quite literally: there were no sacred laws or scripture and certainly no organised church or priesthood to police practice and correct error. It was in their images and their names that the gods persisted for at least two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors."

"Contrary to the implications of the open letter, I have never actually done any original research on racial or population differences in intelligence. The only contribution I have made to this area of study is a research ethics paper arguing that “it cannot simply be taken for granted that, when in doubt, stifling debate around taboo topics is the ethical thing to do”. While this paper does not claim that genes do contribute to group differences in intelligence, it does entertain the possibility that they could contribute to such differences."