fellows-of-the-british-academy

"Since the normal tendency is to simplify, to trivialize, to eliminate the unfamiliar word or construction, the rule is praestat difficilior lectio...When we choose the 'more difficult' reading, however, we must be sure that it is in itself a plausible reading. The principle should not be used in support of dubious syntax, or phrasing that it would not have been natural for the author to use. There is an important difference between a more difficult reading and a more unlikely reading."

"Talking with a younger generation of readers, I see how Shelley has become increasingly a European figure, a Dante among English poets, and an image of Faustian daring, whose writing and travels still inspire that primary spirit of adventure into a wider world of ideal possibilities. Nothing is so moving to the as finding an old copy of his book in a stranger's hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its poetry underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its cover bleached with sun and sea."

"There is a tiny pause, right at the start of the film that caught at my heart, but I didn't think anyone else would notice it. It took me back to the work I did on my biography of Virginia Woolf. There were two documents in her archives that I found particularly distressing. One was the little soft-covered notebook she used for her diary for 1941. I knew there wouldn't be any entries after , but I couldn't help turning the blank pages that followed, unable to believe that the voice I had been living with for the past five years had stopped speaking. The other was her suicide note. (One of the suicide notes, in fact. She wrote three — two versions for her husband, , and one for her sister — unable to stop revising her work until the end.)"

"When I was very young, I think I was aware that I was reading different kinds of books, which slightly took my teachers aback. I can remember boastfully telling my teacher, when I was about 10, that I was reading '. She clearly thought this was a bad idea. But I was a slightly odd, inward child. At home – we didn’t have television – I was reading, reading all the time."

"Of the many metaphors for biography, two make useful starting points. One — a disturbing image — is the autopsy, the forensic examination of the dead body which takes place when the is unusual, suspicious, or ambiguous. ... There is something gruesome about this metaphor. It is used when commentators on biography want to emphasize its ghoulish or predatory aspects. ... A contrasting metaphor for biography is the portrait. Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation, portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character. The portraitist simulates warmth, energy, idiosyncrasy, and personality through attention to detail and skill in representation."

"Emotions about our lost houses and gardens have to do with growing old and acquiring guilt: we are always leaving our first home and lamentingly looking back to it. The whole point of the Garden of Eden is that we are going to leave it, and then spend the rest of our time wishing we could return to it."

"It is a brilliant vignette, prompting a meditation on the role of memory in biographical writing, and an exploration of the things that get forgotten in the writing of lives. Throughout This Long Pursuit, Holmes moves between reflections on the subjects of his career as a and sketches of himself at work. We see him lecturing on Coleridge at the , scribbling at a table in the , scurrying from the with a glossy catalogue under his arm and newly discovered stories brimming in his mind. The result is a glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, and ’."

"The had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its ' was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of s and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public. This became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the ‘experimental method' became the basis of a new, secular , in which the infinite (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake."

"At eighteen, just out of and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ', as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the , following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a , sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The is like a French version of the , wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle toile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a for fifty s in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began."

"Holmes is not offering a history of either or its technologies. The and are barely mentioned (perhaps because they feature in The Age of Wonder). What we have instead is a "cluster of balloon stories" drawn from life and fiction, and more from life than from fiction. Some of the footnotes are anecdotal, but the book itself is more than that; Holmes is a distinguished with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around them."

"Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end in itself since the middle class would always had ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won. The bureaucracy and officer corps had to be eliminated. What was needed, in fact, was not just an uprising as demanded by the Bolsheviks but a commitment to a struggle to 'make the revolution permanent'."

"The Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom."

"The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of 'European revolution' but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them."

"I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost Sat for a civil service post. The English paper for that year Had several questions on King Lear, Which Shakespeare answered very badly Because he hadn’t read his Bradley."

"It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our master."

"I have dwelt thus at length on Hamlet's melancholy because, from the psychological point of view, it is the centre of the tragedy, and to omit it from consideration or to underrate its intensity is to make Shakespeare's story unintelligible. But the psychological point of view is not equivalent to the tragic; and, having once given its due weight to the fact of Hamlet's melancholy, we may freely admit, or rather may be anxious to insist, that this pathological condition would excite but little, if any, tragic interest if it were not the condition of a nature distinguished by that speculative genius on which the Schlegel–Coleridge type of theory lays stress. Such theories misinterpret the connection between that genius and Hamlet's failure, but still it is this connection which gives to his story its peculiar fascination and makes it appear (if the phrase may be allowed) as the symbol of a tragic mystery inherent in human nature. Wherever this mystery touches us, wherever we are forced to feel the wonder and awe of man's godlike 'apprehension' and his 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' and at the same time are forced to see him powerless in his petty sphere of action, and powerless (it would appear) from the very divinity of his thought, we remember Hamlet. And this is the reason why, in the great ideal movement which began towards the close of the eighteenth century, this tragedy acquired a position unique among Shakespeare's dramas, and shared only by Goethe's Faust. It was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of the doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring."

"All our Greek texts of the Elements up to a century ago…purport in their titles to be either ‘from the edition of Theon’…or ‘from the lectures of Theon... [Greek commentaries] commonly speak of the writer of the Elements instead of using his name."

"For many people, the attraction of Plimpton 322 has been exactly its status as a ‘first infantile step’ on the way to modern Western-style mathematics. (Robson 2001)."

"Though this is the proposition universally associated by tradition with the name of Pythagoras, no really trustworthy evidence exists that it was actually discovered by him."

"True, the discovery is also claimed for India. The work relied on is the Apastamba-Sulba-Sutra, the date of which is put at least as early as the fifth or fourth century B.C., while it is remarked that the matter of it must have been much older than the book itself ... There is a proposition stating the theorem of Eucl. I. 47 as a fact in general terms, but without proof […] Certain considerations suggest doubts as to whether the proposition had been established by any proof applicable to all cases. Thus Apastamba mentions only seven rational right angle triangles; he had no general rule such as that attributed to Pythagoras for forming any number of rational right-angle triangles; [his words imply] that he knew no other such triangles. […] the theorem is enunciated and used as if it were of general application; there is, however, no sign of any general proof; there is nothing in fact to show that the assumption of its universal truth was founded on anything better than an imperfect induction from a certain number of cases, discovered empirically, of triangles with sides in the ratios of whole numbers in which the property (1) that the square on the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two was found to be always accompanied by the property (2) that the latter two sides include a right angle."

"In the 1840s rival British and French teams began to uncover and document the remains of vast stone palaces near Mosul, now in northern Iraq but then part of the Ottoman Empire whose capital was Istanbul. The adventurers quickly identified the ruins they were digging as the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, known to them through the stories of the Old Testament and Classical authors. Thus they claimed it as part of their own, European heritage, and were little interested in its place in Middle Eastern history and tradition per se. Thus unwittingly the tone was set for interpreting ancient Assyrian – and, later, Babylonian and Sumerian – remains. […] The finds represented the ‘cradle of civilization,’ mankind’s first tottering steps toward European sophistication. [And] they were potential witnesses to events described in the Old Testament, appearing at a crucial juncture in Western European intellectual history […]. (Robson 2007: 59)."

"Even more so than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there are major structural trends that are threatening to change the way we experience politics: climate change, developments in technology such as AI or shifts in how we do finance such as bitcoin and other similar technologies."

"What the Roman Empire is to European history, the Mongol Empire is to Asian history."

"What seems to destroy world orders (at least in history) is not great power rivalry, but structural pressures that fray connective tissues."

"If you were living in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century, you would not think Europe was the center of the world, you would think “Asia” (whatever you called it) was the center of the world"

"It is clear that for Herbert Hunger, Byzantium was not an exotic phenomenon in the historical and political self-awareness of Austria in the twentieth century, but a legacy and consequently a claim whose pointed cultivation should certainly benefit the country's image. This – one might say – national goal, which we today would rather describe as a European goal, has, as we all know, been realized."

"From the late nineteenth century, economics gradually became a more technocratic, tool-based, science, using mathematics and statistics embedded in various kinds of analytical techniques. ... By the late twentieth century, economics had become heavily dependent on a set of reasoning tools that economists now call 's': small mathematical, statistical, graphical, diagrammatic, and even physical objects that can be manipulated in various different ways. Today, in the twenty-first century, if we go to an economics seminar, or read a learned scientific paper in that field, we find that economists write down some equations or maybe draw a diagram, and use those to develop solutions to their theoretical conundrums or to answer questions about the economic world."

"Of importance for the is that , in both his cycle books, had concentrated his energies on the statistical evidence of the economic interactions involved in the business cycle and the of these relationships rather than on the relation between the economic cycle and the exogenous causal factor. Moore's concern with evidence end statistical explanation compared to that of Jevons, and the matching change in contemporaries' responses, are both indicative of the development of the econometric approach by the early years of the twentieth century. Yet, it was some years before Moore's broad econometric approach to the explanation of economic cycles, involving a large number relationships linking different parts of the economy, was taken up by who produced the first macro econometric models in the late 1930s."

"The joint work with from that research group, ' ..., is now seen as creating a new strand. The extant philosophy of science thought about s in relation to theory: models were ways of capturing the essence of a theory. What we were doing in that little research group – and what we did in the volume Models as Mediators – was to say, if you look at the way science is practised, you see that scientists treat models as autonomous objects on which they develop arguments. They manipulate them, argue with them, extend them. Models are not in a simple relationship between theory and the world, rather they are at angles to both, so you can use them to interrogate both sides. Models as Mediators is 20 years old, and you can definitely see now that the project as a whole changed the conversation in the philosophy of science about models. I don’t mean that everybody was convinced by it, but it created a big enough presence so that, even if you didn’t agree with it, you had to take it into account. This work was part of a wider move that has been happening toward ‘the philosophy of science in practice’."

"Civilization in its higher form today, though highly complex, forms essentially a unitary mass. It has no longer to be sought out in separate luminous centers, shining like planets through the surrounding night. Still less is it the property of one privileged country or people. Many as are the tongues of mortal man, its votaries, like the Immortals, speak a single language. Throughout the whole vast area illumined by its quickening rays its workers are interdependent and pledged to a common cause."

"j’aime mieux écrire que discuter de vive voix [I much prefer to write than discuss aloud]"

"Mud, muck, ooze upon the floor, torn tents and thunder – all were forgotten as the sherry bottle was opened"

"Europe was only after all a peninsula of Africa and Asia"

"You crawl on your stomach for hours … climbing up yawning abysses (lighted only by an acetylene lamp …) and get knocked on the head by stalactites and on the legs by stalagmites, and in the end arrive at all sorts of wonders; bison modelled in clay, and portraits of sorcerers, and footprints of Magdalenian man."

"Carey argued that the intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books. If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader could not understand it."

"As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform."

"Carey is extremely well read, and uses his impressive knowledge to point out some of the sillinesses of writers, such as in their attacks on "tinned food" and cremation as possible causes for the decline of British civilization. He is a healthy questioner of received opinions. It forces one to rethink one's preconceptions."

"A short time after my father's death I was surprised, indeed a little staggered, to hear an accomplished Oxford professor call him "the most learned man since Bacon.""

"He had read almost every important book on these subjects and, although he had not Acton's miraculous visual memory for books, he never forgot what he read and always had the facts ready in his mind. His Introduction to Political Science has remained what it was on publication, the best book on the subject. Though not a professed Shakespearean scholar, he had the bulk of Shakespeare's plays so incrusted in his memory that he hardly ever had need to refer to the text and was the originator of more than one illuminating emendation. His knowledge of mediæval and of classical history was complete: it was superior to Acton's in that to him they were always living subjects... On balance, and saving alone modern history in its fullest sweep, I am driven to the conclusion that my father's learning was barely, if it all, less than that of so renowned a man as Acton and in some respects greater."

"Pollock was perhaps the last representative of the "old broad culture." To take only his literary recreations, he easily and habitually wrote verse in Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian, he was a brilliant parodist of the English poets from Chaucer down to his friend Swinburne (as in his well-known Leading Cases), and he had quite a fair acquaintance with Persian and Sanskrit. He was an active and prominent member of the Rabelais Club. In addition he was well read in philosophy, and was a respectable mathematician. He was more of a celebrity in Europe and in the United States than here."

"From an early time, again, we have had a central and powerful legislature which, as it represents the estates of the whole realm, has made statutes binding on the whole, and knows no legal bounds to its competence. Thus our laws have been eminently national and positive, and our particular legal habit of mind is perhaps the most insular of our many insular traits. Our long standing apart from the general movement of European thought has had its drawbacks; but I think it the better opinion that both in jurisprudence and in the not wholly dissimilar case of philosophy the gain has outweighed them."

"The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions."

"Our lady the Common Law will note other people's fashions and take a hint from them in season, but she will have no thanks for judges or legislators who steal incongruous tags and patches and offer to bedizen her raiment with them. Assimilation of foreign elements, we have already seen, may be a very good thing. Crude and hasty borrowing of foreign details is unbecoming at best, and almost always mischievous. When you are tempted to make play with foreign ideas or terms, either for imitation or for criticism, the first thing is to be sure that you understand them."

"Equally at home in the Inns of Court and in the Universities, he was for sixty years at the heart of the law. A brooding presence near the Bench, he might have supplied the answer to the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Rooted in the virtues that have come, with whatever truth, to be called Victorian, the fruits of his scholarship were harvested by men who were themselves the products of a new legal education."

"Our Constitution is popular in that the life of the English people, from the greatest to the least, has gone to make it what it is; and it has at almost all times combined the tenacity of tradition with a great power of assimilating fresh elements, and of adapting existing organs to new purposes. For some considerable time our national institutions and our national character have been confirming one another in this habit."

"Pollock was not only a scholar versed in the lore of the ages, but also a constant and eager observer of the modern world, sensitive to its trends of thought and conversant with its larger movements. To the solution of some of its most difficult legal and political problems he devoted his remarkable abilities as a lawyer-statesman. In these and many other ways Pollock proved himself to be one of the leaders of thought in the national and international life of his times. In the breadth of his knowledge, however, which was not confined to any one branch of learning, he stood out from our over-specialized age, and was far more like a man of the Renaissance than a modern. It is this humanistic outlook and culture which give character to all his writings on the subject-matters that chiefly engaged his attention."

"So venerable, so majestic, is this living temple of justice, this immemorial and yet freshly growing fabric of the Common Law, that the least of us is happy who hereafter may point to so much as one stone thereof and say, The work of my hands is there."

"When Charles Darwin created the philosophy of natural history (for no less title is due to the idea which transformed the knowledge of organic nature from a multitude of particulars into a continuous whole), he was working in the same spirit and towards the same ends as the great publicists who, heeding his field of labour as little as he heeded theirs, had laid in the patient study of historical fact the bases of a solid and rational philosophy of politics and law. Savigny, whom we do not yet know or honour enough, and our own Burke, whom we know and honour, but cannot honour too much, were Darwinians before Darwin. In some measure the same may be said of the great Frenchman Montesquieu, whose unequal but illuminating genius was lost in a generation of formalists."

"Since the classical period of Roman law there has never been a constitution of affairs more apt to foster the free and intelligent criticism of legal authorities, the untrammelled play of legal speculation and analysis, than now exists in the States of the American Union, where law is developed under many technically independent jurisdictions, but in deference and conformity to a common ideal."

"All his books, essays, notes, and reviews upon matters legal are marked by a clarity and a felicity of expression which is the touchstone of a master of his craft; and there are one or two passages in some of his essays which reach a high level of eloquence and beauty. The literary quality of his work is due to the extent and variety of his learning in many other subjects besides law. He was an accomplished linguist who could write verses in Latin, Greek, French and German; he knew something of Eastern languages; and he was a philosopher, an historian, and something of a mathematician. He bore his great learning lightly, and, having a subtle sense of humour, he used his literary gifts to produce the witty parodies and other humorous verses which are published in Leading Cases done into English, and in the volume entitled Outside the Law."