Academics From England

"Thanks to two remarkable talks by Mr. Noël Annan on the B.B.C. three years ago, and to my own experience, I am more in sympathy with Kipling's philosophy now than ever I was in childhood or early manhood."

"The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which had held good before the war must now, by definition, be wrong—if indeed they were not responsible for causing the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the pre-suppositions of that comfortable pre-war England were manifestly false. Searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, the ’twenties came to see it through the eyes either of Mrs. Webb or of Mrs. Woolf."

"[That] marvellous compendium of the higher gossip, Our Age."

"Noel Annan captures the last generation's spirit in his wide-ranging, superficial but annoyingly perceptive book Our Age. This was the ethic of the inheriting classes, the public school and Oxbridge intelligentsia and Civil Service élite. Its members staffed the bureaucracies and the media, devised the welfare state, dismembered the Empire, and sanctioned the plural society. They called themselves the great and good."

"Mr Grade is a brilliant television mogul, but on this occasion he has used the language of an insolent jackanapes. He cannot possibly "respect and support" ITC's authority. If he did he would at once apologise and promise not to commission a further series [of The Word]. The ITC was set up by Parliament to safeguard the public against gross breaches of taste, and he is lucky to escape from the infliction of a swingeing fine. Does Mr Grade expect us to believe the media-speak twaddle about "independent research"? Or does he think we are all so ignorant as to believe that all moral judgments are "subjective" and by implication worthless? Clearly his mind needs stretching by a few elementary textbooks on ethics which will enable him to realise that Channel 4 should not celebrate moronic presenters of programmes for sniggering schoolchildren."

"Nostalgia, however, is the mother of loyalty."

"Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary."

"In the 19th century the dons of Oxford and Cambridge emerged as a distinct social class, with their own peculiar and privileged way of life, mysterious to the outside world.... Noel Annan, who died in March at the age of 83, spent more than half a century living this life and writing about it. His last book, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses (University of Chicago Press), is an affectionate elegy for a class that has largely expired."

"The faith of the ’twenties lay not in political machinery but in education and in psycho-analysis: not in votes for women, but in freedom for women. This was the romanticism of a generation affecting to despise the romantic! What is more romantic than to see the eventual triumph of reason, the conquest by the social sciences of misery and evil, the revolution in morals as the panacea to cure the world?"

"It is true that in the most hallowed and ancient of our institutions of higher education, still whispering the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, it can be asserted that the best that has been thought and said must inevitably and inescapably be handcuffed to the study of the Anglo-Saxon. Still there has been a change."

"The diminished respect for authority brought about by the spread of egalitarianism, the multiplicity of choice and styles of life which greater affluence has made possible, the belief in the value of modernity, and the expansion of curiosity and interest, these seem to me to be the main forces which have disintegrated the old cultural pattern."

"When I was at Cambridge just after the war, one of my lecturers was Noel Annan. He was shortly to become, at 39, the youngest ever Provost of King's College. His subject was "Social and Political Thought in the 19th Century". After four years of intellectual stultification in the Army (working briefly in a similar branch of intelligence to Lieutenant-Colonel Annan), I found his course just too packed with ideas, and gave it up — to my eternal regret. The same kind of brilliant compression and synthesis, distinguishes his latest book."

"Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. For the most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories."

"Noël Annan himself, who in Who's Who’s most stylish entry, defines his recreation as "writing English prose", and this book, a prize example of literary gamesmanship, reminds one marvellously of what English prose is like."

"Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society."

"It was right 25 years ago to expand higher education. It was wrong to think it could all be Rolls-Royce education. It was wrong to insist on parity of esteem between university and university and between universities and polytechnics."

"Professor Scruton should — from time to time — try to take the advice Keats gave to his brother. "The only way of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party.""

"... , years before he died, was hidden from most of us in the mist of his own method."

"" Instinct," as said, " is a great matter "; but it is not the whole. believes so much in domination and antagonism that he seems not to believe in men and women—the first act of faith that God requires of the artist."

"I was one of the first in this country—I rather think I was quite the first—to hail in print the genius of Mr. Joyce, when, many years ago, he put forth a quiet little volume of short stories called " ." I saw in his bleak and bitter realism a reading of life."

"Whereas so many writers who are " different " seem to be merely straining away from the conventional in their originality, Mrs. Woolf transcends it easily: she has a running lyric strain that lifts the heart. The fairies showered gifts on Mr. Forster; sympathy, wit, knowledge, charm; but an impudent fairy came at the end and made him whimsical. Lovely as his work is, it remains at one remove from life."

"Gerald Gould was important in George Orwell’s life although they may never have met. As Chief Reader for the publisher Victor Gollancz in the early 1930’s Gould was involved in editing Orwell’s early books. On 17 December 1934 Orwell wrote a letter to about possible changes to '; and listed sixteen changes that Gould, and Harold Frederick Rubenstein, a solicitor, playwright, author and literary critic, had recommended. Orwell made some changes, compromised over others and stood firm on some points."

"The civilisation and social structure of our country, rightly or wrongly, take for granted that a few people shall have a lot of money and a lot of power, and great many people very little money and very little power. But the individuals, and particularly the labouring individuals, who create and compose our civilisation and society, are beginning to cease to take this state of things for granted."

"They kept a bird— Poor bird !—in a cage ; Till—so I have heard— Without need, without rage, Cheerfully, coldly, They let it flit, And more than boldly Murdered it. Since the law of nature Is danger and pain, The obedient creature Did not complain, But left as token to everybody The wing broken And the breast bloody."

"I protest, for about the hundredth time, against the slipshod method of quoting a mere author’s name, without any indication of the work of that author in which the alleged quotation may be found. Let us have accurate quotations and exact references, wherever such are to be found. [...] A quotation without a reference is like a geological specimen of unknown locality."

"Taxonomy has a well-defined role, which is much more than simply stamp-collecting and pigeon-holing. are the units of classification, and ; as such they must be defined as objectively as possible. The biological species concept, still widely used in biology, though predominantly by non-taxonomists and all too often misunderstood, is a process-based concept, which offers no criterion for the classification of beyond and hypothesis. The phylogenetic species concept—a pattern-based concept—is as nearly objective as we are likely to get. Amount of difference is not a criterion for recognizing species. It is not possible to insist on at the specific level, but it is mandatory for the higher categories (, , etc.). The rank we assign to a given supraspecific category should be determined by its time depth."

"As new methods of investigation become available to us, levels of analysis can be conducted: nuances undreamed of by , , , even . Science had advanced, but human behavior has not. People still hunt gorillas for food or trophies, and still cut down their forests; but now those same advances in science also enable forests to be cut down more efficiently, gorillas to be hunted more efficiently, human populations to increase ever faster and press in on the remaining habitat, so that our second-closest relative is threatened with disappearing for ever. More and more, the work of taxonomists and other biologists must be put into the service of conservation."

"The first of the 'complete theories' of evolution developed in modern times was the of (1969; translation of work published in 1922). While badly hampered by an ignorance of genetics, slow to reach the Russia of the early twentieth century, Berg's consideration of the Darwinian model led him to the conclusion that it was incompatible, at least as the major mechanism, with what he knew of the pattern of living organisms and their evolution."

"This article reviews changes in , especially those pertaining to the meaning of the term species, since its inception two and a half centuries ago. Despite continuing discoveries and the involvement of competent practitioners, the adoption of the polytypic species concept, especially underpinned by the biological species concept, ensured that primate taxonomy was in a sorry state by the middle of the twentieth century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a gradual rethinking of the nature of species took place, and many different species concepts were proposed. The phylogenetic species concept has been widely adopted over the past ∼20 years, sustained by a gradual realization that species are evolutionary lineages. This review provides examples of how the old way of thinking about species hampered our understanding of primate biodiversity and of how the phylogenetic species concept (or the diagnosability criterion under the general lineage concept) has clarified matters, opening them up for discussion. The adoption of this evolutionary view of species has implications for conservation, particularly because it increases recognition of biodiversity."

"There has been a lot of discussion about ‘the species question’ over the past 20–30 years, and several surveys have converged on the essence of what we mean by species: they are evolutionary lineages ... Species thus have a real existence. This settles the ontological status of the species concept, but it does not necessarily solve the question of how to recognise them; the most logical way of defining species operationally is by the so-called Phylogenetic Species Concept: ‘A species is the smallest population or aggregation of populations which has fixed heritable differences from other such populations or aggregations’ ..."

"While studying under the supervision of , he had the good fortune to meet , , and , all of them famous researchers in the field of Anthropology and Primatology. Equally important to Colin, as he recalled in Groves (2008), was his meeting with − then at ."

"This useful book surveys endangered species (and subspecies), stating where each lives and why it is endangered. ... The non-Australian conservationist will find much of interest here. The devastation wreaked by introduced species has been astounding: so many formerly widespread species have been swept off their entire mainland ranges by competition from the introductions, survivng only if their ranges happened to include offshore islands which were not reached by rabbits, hares, foxes, feral cats, introduced rats and mice, goats, donkeys, horses, camels, buffaloes, sparrows, starlings, blackbirds."

"The place of origin of the is unknown, but both and ', today neatly separated by the Sahara, found their earliest ancestors in the , while a Potamochoerine, ', survived in into the ."

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

"The earth on which we live has too great an influence on ourselves, directly and indirectly, to justify ignorance on the subject of its nature and constitution, or the laws which govern its material existence. The history of the present is too nearly connected with, and too directly derived from, the events of the past to allow us safely to neglect it; and the mode of arrangement of the materials of which the outer film of matter, sometimes called the "," is composed, too deeply involves the question of the daily and yearly change that takes place in what we see about us, to permit with safely any indifference in the comparison of results, often hardly to be distinguished except in degree, and in the probable date of their occurrence. In all these matters the investigations concerning the earth's history, which are most generally understood by the term Geology, are found to be very interesting and important in a general sense, and afford much useful information ..."

"Nature offers many of her books for our study; for every department of knowledge, large or small, may be looked on as a separate volume. Astronomy supplies not a few, Chemistry many more, Zoology and Botany each its quota. Of these a number have been read and studied with more or less success. In a few cases we seem to have learnt something of the general plan of Nature; in others, mere glimpses are made out of local and partial phenomena. Many departments have only lately attracted attention; many, probably, there are which are not yet known to exist. Some, on the other hand, have been in course of development ever since man was an intelligent and observing animal, recording his own experiences for the benefit of future races."

"Europe and Asia are not naturally separated; that is, there is no large ocean and no unbroken chain of lofty mountains serving as a barrier to prevent the inhabitants of the one from entering the other. A , not much higher than those of Scotland, and a , are the boundaries that separate them geographically. The two countries of Russia and Turkey, which alone approach the boundary line, possess territory on both sides of it."

"... the as a substitute for is a law about the metrical properties of space around the "attracting" mass. Since it is to have universal validity, it must be a mathematical formula whose form is preserved when it is transformed from any one system of coordinates to any other; and since each system has its own time-measure as well as its own space-measures, time as well as space must be involved in the metrical properties with which the law deals."

"I would like to thank John Garnett for a lot of very helpful advice."

"Every scheme of education being, at bottom, a practical philosophy, necessarily touches life at every point. Hence any educational aims which are concrete enough to give definite guidance are correlative to ideals of life—and, as ideals of life are eternally at variance, their conflict will be reflected in educational theories."

"I learned mathematics on my own from textbooks which is perhaps strange given that both my parents were involved in the subject. At the same time, I spent a good deal of time studying art and wanted to follow a career in that direction until I was eventually convinced by my family that I should first work for a mathematics degree to ensure that I could earn a living."

"My father ... went on to a position in the mathematics department of the University of East Anglia. While I was growing up, the elementary school I attended was extremely ethnically homogeneous. I was unable to escape from heavy issues concerning race, which my mother always explained in a political context."

"I went to Cambridge, which represented a second major change in my life. As I learned more mathematics, I saw that it is an entire world of its own which many people choose to live in, a world in many ways more real than the real world; it feels permanent, eternal, and offers a deep sense of security because nearly everyone who understands it agrees on what is truth. By the time I had finished at Cambridge, I was very involved with mathematics and did not consider other careers."

"My parents separated after my father resigned his university position to focus on his inventions, and my mother then finished her education and became a school mathematics teacher. We moved to a very cosmopolitan area of London, which was like a new birth for me; it was there that my interest in mathematics really began."

"I do research on a variety of problems in condensed matter physics. My primary interests are in the general field of statistical mechanics."

"My research is in the field of spectral geometry, the study of how the shape of an object affects the modes in which it can resonate. A famous question in the field is, can one hear the shape of a drum? Spectral geometry bridges different branches of science, including engineering and physics, as well as a number of different fields of mathematics. However, quite different sorts of questions are studied within each discipline. I am a mathematical analyst, which gives me an appreciation for the infinite and the infinitesimal. At the moment, one of the things I am working on understanding is the total wavelength of a surface like a sphere or something of greater complexity, such as the surface of a bagel or a pretzel. What is this total wavelength? If you strike a surface it can resonate at any one of a list of frequencies, and the wavelength of the sound produced by the vibration is inversely proportional to the frequency. In the mathematically idealized model there are infinitely many possible wavelengths. The total wavelength should be the sum of all of these individual wavelengths except that this infinite sum equals infinity. Fortunately, a finite number can be assigned to it by a slightly elusive process called regularization. (This process is also used in mathematical physics to mysteriously obtain true answers from formulas which do not really make sense!) I first became interested in the total wavelength as a model related to a question which can be roughly stated as, can one hear the shape of the universe? However, the total wavelength shows up in many quite different areas of mathematics and I am finding these connections intriguing."

"Although I cannot claim to find it easy to balance my ambitions in mathematical research with the desire to be a good parent, to be an inspiring teacher, or to effect positive social change in the world, I do feel very fortunate to be able to spend my life tackling these challenges, which are extremely interesting and important to me."

"I am a mathematical analyst, and most of my research is in the area of spectral geometry. Problems in spectral geometry are also studied by various kinds of geometers, number theorists, applied mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and others. What is Spectral geometry? Spectral geometry most usually means the study of how the geometry of an object is related to the natural frequencies of the object. These are the frequencies at which the object can vibrate. A vibrating object often produces a sound, and the frequencies can be heard as the dominant tone and the overtones of the sound. The well known question highlighting what spectral geometry is all about is the question "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" I am a mathematical analyst, and most of my research is in the area of spectral geometry. Problems in spectral geometry are also studied by various kinds of geometers, number theorists, applied mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and others. In mathematical terms, the natural frequencies of an object (or rather their squares) are the eigenvalues of a partial differential operator called the Laplacian. This Laplacian takes each function defined on the object and differentiates it twice to give a new function. The eigenvalues of the Laplacian form an infinite sequence of numbers tending to infinity. In spectral geometry we study how these numbers depends on the shape of the object. For people who like to know the full story, I should mention that many spectral geometers (including me) who work on the Laplacian on smooth manifolds study the whole sequence of eigenvalues of the Laplacian. Now the low eigenvalues can give accurate values for the frequencies at which a real life object vibrates, but the very high eigenvalues do not correspond to genuine physical vibrations of the object because of molecular forces and damping. These effects are not included in the model where the vibration is driven by the Laplacian alone. This means that my research is rather different from that of an engineer who wishes to model precisely the vibrations of a real life object. In actual fact the questions I work on are more closely related to mathematics arising in quantum physics and string theory. In addition, I don't always study the Laplacian, but also the eigenvalues of other operators, which might represent other physical quantities than the frequencies of vibration. I mostly study spectral geometry for nice smooth objects such as spheres and tori, but some people work on rough objects and even discrete objects like graphs. In the last eight years, I have worked mostly on the spectral zeta function, which is an infinite sum of powers of the eigenvalues. In particular, I have worked on the zeta-regularised determinant, which is used in topology, quantum field theory, and string theory. Recently, I have been very interested in the sum of squares of the wavelength of a surface, which is related to all kinds of different things including vortex theory."

"The thing that really changed the Vatican's diplomatic position was the war itself. The Entente had to rebuild relations with the Vatican."

"Three cheers for our queer old dean!"