Academics From The United Kingdom

"The historians of [India] have been noticed down to a period when new actors appear upon the stage; when a more stirring and eventful era of India's History commences; and when the full light of European truth and discernment begins to shed its beams upon the obscurity of the past, and to relieve us from the necessity of appealing to the Native Chroniclers of the time, who are, for the most, dull, prejudiced, ignorant, and superficial… there is no Native Indian Historian; and few have even approached to so high a standard…of philosophy…we search in vain for any sign or symptom…[The history we write of India] will make our native subjects more sensible of the immense advantages accruing to them under the mildness and and equity of our rule."

"The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to a decadent south."

"It is disappointing to have to say that at present there seems to be no hope of estimating objectively and with a useful degree of precision how long an originally homogeneous Indo-European language would have taken to develop into derivative groups or languages which diverged as much as Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite did when the earliest texts in them were composed. Some linguists seem to think that they can make intuitive judgements about the minimum time which a particular phonetic or other change in a language would have taken. But the results of intuition when applied to estimating the minimum time in which a group of cognate languages or dialects would have differentiated to an observed extent vary so much that no useful deductions can be made from them. I sympathize with archaeologists and other prehistorians who are not primarily linguists over this. Linguists are unable to provide the information which would be most useful."

"In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, . Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'."

"It's a cliché, but I think it's an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories."

"… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like , though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from at . The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, . Together the newlyweds tramped up to and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory '. Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame."

"By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — has become a kind of symbolic mother to us all. She is also, of course, the symbolic mother that we feel we ought to be. Right through the last century, brides were given a "Mrs Beeton" on their wedding day as a to help them become the kind of woman that everyone, but especially their own mothers, expected. Young women setting off for married life in India, Australia or Canada were similarly presented with a "Mrs Beeton" by which it was hoped they would carry the mother culture far into places where previously only chaos and savagery — in other words, un-Englishness — had reigned. So there is a kind of pleasing logic to the fact that the original Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 was written to plug a gap where existing maternal relations had broken down. In the mid-19th century, middle-class women were, for the first time in history, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their native communities. Rapid urbanisation and the arrival of the railways meant that married life now involved setting up home sometimes hundreds of miles from the house where you were born. Where once you had been able to pop next door to ask mother's advice on a baby's cough or the best way to stone currants, now there was no one to consult. It was to fill this blind spot that a 21-year-old newly married woman, Isabella Beeton, decided to compile an encyclopaedia of domestic know-how, creating a paper and print version of Mother."

"The figure of the must be one of the most familiar and abiding images in nineteenth-century literature. We know her best in the form of the scandalous of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or as Charlotte Brontë's , the plain orphan who eventually marries her employer, the mysterious . In addition, she appears in scores of other novels from high literature to sensationalist shockers and from Emma to '. Yet it is one of the great ironies of that we know virtually nothing about the 25,000 women who actually worked as governesses during the middle years of the century. Indeed, it is the very power of these fictional representations which has blunted our curiosity about the practice of educating girls at home during the Victorian period."

"I was looking for a subject for my next book and failing to find one. My agent told me that during a recent lunch an editor had mentioned that he thought that the time was right for a new biography of George Eliot. The moment I started writing a biography I realised that the was made for me – or perhaps, more modestly, that I was made for the genre. Biography involves detailed with the ability to tell a jolly good story. And those are the two things I like best in the world."

"In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of in . He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the public charged with checking on the welfare of those unhappy souls who had been deemed insane and sent to what was still known colloquially as the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. During his tour Rider 'noticed a quiet little man drawing cats': 'Good Lord, man, you draw like .' 'I am Louis Wain,' replied the patient. 'You're not, you know,' I exclaimed. 'But I am,' said the artist, and he was."

"My grandmother was a cat lady. She actually bred s. She also had a lot of books around. So I grew up with that. And the thing is that I found them a bit frightening. ... there is always something slightly odd about Louis Wain's world. ... tensions in people society through cat society ..."

"Policy itself is now bought and sold, it is a commodity and a profit opportunity, and there is a growing global market in policy ideas. Policy work is also increasingly being out-sourced to profit-making organisations, which bring their skills, discourses and sensibilities to the policy table, for an hourly rate or on contract to the state."

"Money is also important in getting neoliberalism, as a doctrine and as a set of policy ideas, into the public and political imagination. That is, funding for advocacy, ‘research’ and ‘influence’ activities in making neoliberalism thinkable, possible, obvious and necessary."

"Capital, through philanthropic foundations, invests in the work of think tanks and advocacy networks and policy entrepreneurs with the intention and hope of exacting extensions to the commodification of the social, the creation of new markets and the deregulation of existing ones."

"In most education policy research money is rarely mentioned and is overwritten by a focus on ideas and practices. Even when subjected to the arcane mercies of the economics of education, issues of funding are dealt with as abstractions. However, in the interface between education policy and neoliberalism money is everywhere."

"I would have wished that I could write in some detail of the nature of our work in those wonderfully exciting days. For we were regularly reading the highest grade cipher messages passing between the German High Command and a the senior echelons of the German army, the German navy (including the U-boat fleet) and the Luftwaffe; moreover, we were reading those messages within a few hours of their original transmission. We were thus able to provide as perfect and complete picture of the enemy's plans and dispositions as any nation at war has ever had at its disposal — not lightly did Churchill described our work as his "secret weapon," far more potent than anything Werner von Braun could deploy against us. Unfortunately, the British government currently is behaving in a remarkably paranoid fashion with respect to the revelations of "secrets" by those who at some time (as, of course, I had to do) taken an oath of confidentiality."

"I also attended his eightieth birthday celebration in , in 2003. Peter gave a wonderful polished talk about his experiences at in World War II, which was informative and moving and made a political point. I noticed that he frequently paused to refer to a very small sheaf of notes in his hand. He left the papers on the rostrum after the talk, and out of curiosity I took a look. They were blank! It was a ."

"Slave raiding in conjunction with infidels was perhaps the ultimate negation of the ideal of holy war. Around 1500, Muslims were accused of mounting such attacks with Animist Fulbe in West Africa. A seventeenth-century Ottoman literary source described Christians and Muslims setting out on joint piratical expeditions in the Mediterranean."

"[F]or the further improvement of natural philosophy a more advanced geometry must be found. ...[T]he reason why physical science has here been brought to a level that is the envy of foreigners is the knowledge... of some more universal geometry. Of what part of this the learned owe to this renowned university and in it to the prince of geometers I shall not speak lest I appear to be fawning, which in a mathematician would be unseemly."

"My design in publishing this Book, was, that the Celestial Physics, which the most sagacious Kepler had got the scent of, but the Prince of Geometers Sir Isaac Newton, brought to such a pitch as surprises all the World, might, by my... illustrating, become easier to such as are desirous of being acquainted with Philosophy and Astronomy."

"[T]he increases of optics, geography and other sciences... are also due to the application of the more intricate geometry to philosophical matters. Hence has been made clear the curvature of the rays of light in the same medium; hence the causes of extraordinary s have been laid bare; hence, given one surface of a lens, another may be determined by means of which a ray entering the lens with given position will have a given position in emerging from it; hence in geography the excess of the normal diameters of the axis over the axis is found, and also the al figure of any planet; hence the varying gravity of the same body in different parts of the Earth, and the varying length of an isochronous pendulum according to the latitude of its place, and then indeed, after the due correction, the construction of a universal measure and of a perfect ."

"[T]he Physics, it is all taken out of the above mention'd Authors; but is here intermix'd with Astronomy, in such places as seem'd proper and convenient; the Geometry to be met with in it, I have either borrowed elsewhere, and quoted... or delivered it Lemmatrically."

"The phenomena prove that the tail of a comet is vapour from its head which, when the comet is greatly heated in the neighbourhood of the sun in perihelion, continually rises up and moves away into the regions opposite the sun."

"[T]hose who are less vers'd in the more abstruse parts of Geometry, or less concerned about the Physical parts, may pass over, and only read the Astronomy separately and distinct..."

"[T]hose persons seem to apply their thoughts but to a very indifferent purpose in the study of Nature, that overlook this part of Astronomy, from whence the principal and most simple Laws of Nature are to be learn'd."

"The Celestial Physics, or Physical Astronomy, is not only the first in dignity of all inquiries into Nature... but the first in order, because it is the easiest."

"[T]he Physics delivered in the following Work... was both known and diligently cultivated by the most ancient Philosophers. ...[T]he true System of the World, approv'd of Pythagoras, and others among the Ancients..."

"I will add another thing which I also had from Dr. Bentley himself. Mr. Halley was then thought of for successor, to be in a mathematick professorship at Oxford; and bishop Stillingfleet was desired to recommend him at court; but hearing that he was a sceptick, and a banterer of religion, he scrupled to be concern'd; 'till his chaplain, Mr. Bentley, should talk with him about it; which he did. But Mr. Halley was so sincere in his infidelity, that he would not so much as pretend to believe the christian religion, tho' he thereby was likely to lose a professorship; which he did accordingly; and it was then given to Dr. Gregory: Yet was Mr. Halley afterwards chosen into the like professorship there, without any pretence to the belief of christianity. Nor was there any enquiry made about my successor Mr. Sandersons christianity, even when the university of Cambridge had just banished me for believing and examining it so throughly, that I hazarded all I had in the world for it."

"It was also during my being chaplain to bishop More, that I published my first work, intitled, A New Theory of the Earth, from its Original to the Consummation of all Things, wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as laid down in the Holy Scriptures, are Shewn to be perfectly agreeable to Reason and Phylosophy. ...In the New Theory, fifth edition... Lem. xxxii. Schol. instead of its latter part, read, as Sir Isaac Newton also did in his latter writing of this nature, I mean the Theory of the Moon, publimed by Dr. Gregory, and has suppofed the sun's parallax, 10″; and from this hypothesis I made these and the following calculations. Which therefore cannot be far from truth..."

"Gregory, David, nephew of preceeding James Gregory (1638-1675)], was born at Aberdeen in 1661, and died 1708, Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford. He published, 1. 'Exercitatio Geometrica de Dimensione Figurarum,' 4to. Edinb. 1684. 2. 'Catoptricæ et Diopticræ Sphericæ Elementa,' 8vo. Oxon. 1695. 3. 'Astronomæ Physicæ et Geometriæ Elementa,' fol. Oxon. 1702, and 4to. Genev. 1726. 4. 'Treatise of Practical Geometry,' originally written in Latin, and of which a translation by Mr. MacLaurin, was published in 8vo. 1745, and again in 1751. 5. 'A Short Treatise of the Nature of Arithmetic and Logarithms,' printed at the end of Keill's translation of Commandine's Euclid, besides several papers in the 'Philosophical Transactions.'"

"[T]he Opinion of the Ancients concerning Gravity... they were perswaded that Gravity was not an affection of Terrestrial Bodies only, but of the Celestial also, that all Bodies gravitate towards one another; and that the Planets are retained in their Orbits by the force of Gravity, and lastly, that the Gravity of the Planets towards the Sun are reciprocally as the Squares of their Distances from it. What the industry and skill of the Moderns have added to these inventions of the Ancients, the following Pages do declare at large."

"David Gregory’s manuscript ‘Isaaci Neutoni methodus fluxionum’ is the first systematic presentation of the method of fluxions written by somebody other than Newton. It was penned in 1694, when Gregory was the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. ...[I]t sheds light upon Gregory’s views on how Newton’s mathematical innovations related to... other mathematicians, both British and Continental. This paper... proves that Newton, far from being—as often stated—wholly isolated and reluctant to publish the method of fluxions, belonged to a network of mathematicians who were made aware of his discoveries. Second, it shows that Gregory—very much as other Scottish mathematicians such as George Cheyne and John Craig—received Newton’s fluxional method within a tradition that was independent from England and that, before getting in touch with Newton, had assimilated elements of the calculi developed on the Continent."

"[U]niversally, the Weights which generate all Tones in Strings, are reciprocally as the Squares of the lengths of Strings of equal Tension, producing the same sound in any Musical Instrument."

"For Pythagoras as he was passing by a Smith's Shop, took occasion to observe, that the Sounds the Hammers made, were more accute or grave in proportion to the weights of the Hammers; afterwards stretching Sheeps Guts, and fastning various Weights to them, he learn'd that here likewise the Sounds were proportional to the Weights. Having satisfy'd himself of this, he investigated the Numbers, according to which Consonant Sounds were generated. Whether the whole of this Story be true, or but a Fable, 'tis certain Pythagoras found out the true ratio between the sound of Strings and the Weights fasten'd to them."

"Pythagoras... applied the proportion he had thus found by experiments, to the Heavens, and from thence learn'd the Harmony of the Spheres. And, by comparing these Weights with the Weights of the Planets, and the intervals of the Tones, produced by the Weights, with the interval of the Spheres; and lastly, the lengths of Strings with the Distances of the Planets from the Center of the Orbs; he understood, as it were by the Harmony of the Heavens, that the Gravity of the Planets towards the Sun (according to whose measures the Planets move) were reciprocally as the Squares of their Distances from the Sun."

"The Science of Astronomy which is as much esteem'd and admir'd for its great and manifold uses for the Service of Mankind, as it is delightful and entertaining to the more curious and contemplative, has in all ages been cultivated and improv'd, by Men the most eminent for their parts and learnings; and is now brought... to the utmost degree of perfection, and that chiefly by the Superior Genius and Industry of those of our own Nation. But since nothing considerable therein, has been as yet writ in our own Language... I could not oblige my Country-Men more than in publishing an English Edition of the most valuable and finish'd piece of Astronomy now extant. It is generally reckoned to be a Book that contains not only all the Discoveries and Philosophical Sentiments of the great Kepler, and the various Hypotheses of the most noted Astronomers before and since his Time; but is chiefly valued by the best Judges, for the large and instructive Comments... on the Writings of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton, as well as on the Several Astronomical Dissertations of the Sagacious Dr. Halley, which the Reader will find here every where interspers'd. ...I shall, in a very little time, present... another Volume, containing correct Astronomical Tables, for the ready computing of the Planets Places, Eclipses, &c. all done by a Person of known ability, from the true Theory of Gravity, deliver'd in this Book: For it was by no means judged proper that I should annex to so intire a piece as this, any imperfect Tables, drawn from a different Principle from what is here established, such it seems all those as yet published are."

"Nor were they so absurd in their conceptions about Gravity, as to think that it was done by the virtue of any point within the Earth, or of a Center, to which all heavy Bodies placed any where tended; but they thought it was done by the power of the whole Matter in the Terrestrial Globe attracting all things to it self: And as the power of the is composed of the powers of the several parts combin'd together, so they believed that the Gravity towards the whole Earth, resulted from the Gravity towards each single part of it. ...[T]hey believ'd there was a Gravity towards the Moon and Sun, acting in the same manner as it does towards the Earth; and that each Planet, like a Stone, whirl'd in a sling, was kept in its Orbit by the same principle, and for the same reason revolving always about us."

"From some things mention'd by Diogenes Laertius concerning Plato, which also are obscurely hinted at in his Timæus I am apt to believe with Galileo that the divine Philosopher suppos'd the Mundane Bodies, when they were first formed, were moved with a Rectilinear motion (by the means of Gravity,) but after that they had arrived to some determined places, they began to revolve by degrees in a Curve, the Rectilinear Motion being chang'd into a Curvilinear one."

"[S]o also they were not unacquainted with the Law and Proportion which the action of Gravity observ'd according to the different Masses and Distances. For that Gravity is proportional to the Quantity of Matter in the heavy Body, Lucretius does sufficiently declare, as also that what we call light Bodies, don't ascend of their own accord, but by the action of a force underneath them, impelling them upwards, just as a piece of Wood is in Water; and further, that all Bodies, as well the heavy as the light, do descend in vacuo, with an equal celerity."

"'Tis from this Doctrine of Gravity, that all Bodies gravitate mutually to one another, 'tis by this that Lucretius, taught by Epicurus and Democritus, labours to prove, that the Universe has no Center or lowest Place, but that there is an infinity of Worlds like ours in the immense Space. His Argument... If the nature of things were bounded any where, then the outmost Bodies, since they have no other beyond them, towards which they may be made to tend by the force of Gravity, wou'd not stand in an Equilibrio, but make towards the inner and lower Bodies, being necessarily inclin'd that way by their Gravity, and therefore having made towards one another, during an infinite space of time, would have long ago met, and lye in the middle of the whole, as in the lowest place."

"Lucretius and those whom he followed, believ'd that all Bodies did Gravitate towards the Matter placed around them, and that every single Body was carried by the more prevailing Gravity, towards that region where there was most Matter."

"[T]he famous Theorem about the proportion whereby Gravity decreases in receding from the Sun, was not unknown at least to Pythagoras. This indeed seems to be that which he and his followers would signify to us by the Harmony of the Spheres: That is, they feign'd Apollo playing upon an Harp of seven Strings, by which Symbol, as it is abundantly evident from Pliny, Macrobius and , they meant the Sun in Conjunction with the seven Planets, for they made him the leader of that Septenary Chorus, and Moderator of Nature; and thought that by his Attractive force he acted upon the Planets (and called it Jupiter's Prison, because it is by this Force that he retains and keeps them in their Orbits, from flying off in Right Lines) in the Harmonical ratio of their Distances. For the forces, whereby equal tensions act upon Strings of different lengths (being equal in other respects) are reciprocally as the Squares of the lengths of the Strings."

"After I had taken holy orders, I returned to the college, and went on with my own studies there, particularly the mathematicks, and the Cartesian philosophy; which was alone in vogue with us at that time. But it was not long before I, with immense Pains, but no assistance, set myself, with the utmost zeal, to the Study of Sir Isaac Newtons wonderful discoveries in his ', one or two of which Lectures I had heard... read in the publick Schools, though I understood them not at all... Being indeed greatly excited thereto by a Paper of Dr. Gregory’s when he was Professor in Scotland; wherein he had given the most prodigious Commendations to that work, as not only right in all things, but in a manner the Effect of a plainly divine genius, and had already caused several of his Scholars to keep Acts, as we call them, upon several branches of the Newtonian Philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor Wretches, were ignominiously studying the fictitious Hypotheses of the Cartesian, which Sir Isaac Newton had also himself done formerly, as I have heard him say."

"[W]ith this one problem... three years ago, after the above was published, Gottfried Leibniz... produced a construction... in terms of his system—not without the blemish of paralogism."

"Mr Issac Newton in addition to the geometric figure in any orbit of a projectile sought also to find the measure of the (tending to a given centre) of the body borne in that orbit, from whatever cause that force may arise, be it from a deeper mechanical one or from a law imposed by the supreme creator of all things. He inquires geometrically into the law of centripetal force of a body moved in the circumference of a circle with the force tending to a given point either on the circumference or anywhere outside it or inside it, or even infinitely removed. By the same method he seeks the law of centripetal force tending to the centre of a plane nautical spiral (that is one that the radii cut in a given angle) which will drive a body in that spiral. Also the law of centripetal force that would make a body rotate in an ellipse when the centre of the ellipse coincides with the centre of forces. If the ellipse is changed into a hyperbola and the centripetal force into a centrifugal one the same things apply to the hyperbola. Also the resolution of the same problem when the centre of forces coincides with either focus of the ellipse shows that the law of centripetal force is reciprocally in the duplicate ratio of the distance [as the inverse square of the distance]; others had long before shown that this was the one and only law that would satisfy the other phenomenon observed by Kepler in the motion of the planets. These results also apply to the hyperbola and the parabola when the centre of forces is situated in a focus of the conic section."

"But... Kepler’s problem was to be resolved, to find the position of a body moved in an elliptical orbit at a given time. As concerns an algebraic resolution... adapted to the construction of tables, we... also have produced a work not... to be ashamed of."

"[W]e have come into the age where questions that were once cosmographical are being transformed into geometrical problems. For it has now been shown not only that the areas which bodies driven in a circuit describe by the radii drawn to the centre of forces are in immobile planes and proportional to the times, but also conversely that every body moved in this way is impelled by a centripetal force that tends towards the aforesaid point. By this proposition alone the Ptolemaic system is destroyed, for the primary planets by radii drawn to the Earth describe areas in no way proportional to the times, while with the radii drawn to the sun it is established that they run over areas sufficiently proportional to the times."

"After Kepler’s bold and fruitful efforts to advance natural philosophy by the help of geometry, there should have appeared any philosopher and particularly a geometer, namely Descartes, who should leave this one narrow path and try to investigate the causes of things logically, or rather, sophistically. What is to be said of him who while certainly learned in geometry would build his cosmic system (which he valued so highly and of which he boasted so grandiloquently) from vortices, without previously examining whether bodies carried around by a vortex at different distances from the centre would have periodic times whose squares were as the cubes of the distances from the centre? But he was intoxicated by easier and less composite laws, and, not applying his geometric ability in the slightest, fell into errors from which we were at length liberated by the aid of geometers."

"Since two or more mutually gravitating bodies describe orbits around a common immobile centre of gravity, and since by common consent there is an immense difference between the quantity of matter in the sun and that in the Earth, it is clear that neither the sun nor, much less, the sun in the company of five planets can revolve around an immobile Earth. Thus is shown not only the falsity but the impossibility of the ."

"But, since the law of centripetal force employed by nature is to be discovered from its symptoms, the indisputably elliptical orbit and the sesquialteral ratio of the periodic times and the distances from the centre of forces, the same great Newton solved not only the universal problem of determining the trajectory and the motion in it for any given centripetal force, but also its converse. After this universal problem had been solved the sequel was to find other [quantities] in the geometric figure that are measures of physical qualities; for example, that the periodic times in ellipses are in the sesquiplicate ratio of the transverse axes [the squares of the times are as the cubes of the axes], and as many other things similar to these as possible. Also, for instance, to compare this force, which we experience in the planets, with another given force near to us, namely gravity. But also the new philosophy was to concern itself with movable elliptical orbits, in which the line of apsides either advances or retires. Also, for instance, a more exact [theory] of rectilinear descent and of the motion of pendulous bodies than the Huygenian one, since that supposes the centre to be infinitely removed. Therefore also, other s different from the common one and variously devised according as the pendulum oscillates inside or outside the surface of the Earth. And let that suffice for this problem. But also on account of the mutual actions of bodies moving around a centre the orbits usually turn out to be deformed, and also an investigation of these actions and of the deformity arising from them, whence arise many minor inequalities of the planets, such as the motion of the nodes, the variation of maximum latitude, and other things in the moon."