Fellows Of The British Academy

"Many Christians, of whom I am one, see no moral dilemma inherent in the possession, and if necessary the use, of nuclear weapons to deter their use against our own peoples by a Soviet state whose leaders are explicitly unconstrained by those considerations of "bourgeois morality" which so properly worry us. It is the initiation of the use of these weapons that causes so many of us such profound concern; and we have come to depend on that initiation because we have acquiesced in a decision to maintain a standard of living far higher than that of our adversaries, rather than provide the resources needed for a convincing defence by non-nuclear means of the territories of Western Europe."

"Hobbes's ideas seemed at least as relevant to the middle decades of the twentieth century as they had been to those of the seventeenth. (Happy the generation now growing up in our universities whose natural affinity appears to be rather with Rousseau!) A situation in which recourse to force is such an imminent probability that one's whole life and policy has to be adjusted to it is not, save in the most formal sense, a state of peace. It is for that reason that I equate peace with that unfashionable term 'Order'; an emphasis which probably brands me as a temperamental Tory rather than a temperamental Whig."

"The Foreign Secretary's Malcolm Rifkind] apologia for Nato enlargement is strong on dogmatic assertion but weak on reasoned argument... "Neither the new Nato nor its expansion poses a threat to Russia". That surely is for the Russians to say. After all, we were taught during the Cold War to base our policies on the capabilities of our adversaries rather than their intentions. To take account of Russian susceptibilities is not to accept their veto over our policies. It is simply to recognise that there can never be stability in Europe unless the Russians feel secure, and to ride roughshod over their susceptibilities is not a very sensible way to guarantee the security of their neighbours to the west."

"So long as the conventional balance remains so uneven, the Western strategy of relying on the first use of nuclear weapons to defend ourselves is not only morally dubious but politically incredible. But the responsibility for this strategy does not lie with the United States. It lies with the governments and peoples of Western Europe who have, for the last thirty years, refused to take the necessary measures to provide for their own conventional defence. That is where the CND is so dangerous. Their present campaign is sending a signal both to Moscow and to the United States, not simply that the peoples of Western Europe are not prepared to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, but that they are not prepared to defend themselves at all: a signal that could create a quite terrifying degree of instability by presenting the leaders of the Soviet Union with options that hitherto have been firmly closed to them."

"The system-builders, from Hegel to Toynbee, selected facts from history to prove an a priori thesis, and presented subjective works of art as objective statements of fact. But the old positivist belief in the possibility of a truly scientific and objective history is no longer held even by the most fanatical members of the Institute of Historical Research."

"The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, selecting evidence to conform to his views and ignoring all that does not. The abuse of history in fact lies less often in the motives of the historian than in his methods. It was after all the most honourable loyalties and affections which led Cardinal Gasquet to attempt the vindication of the monastic orders against the charges of Protestant historians; the formidable Coulton may have been inspired merely by acrimonious anti-Popish spite; but Coulton was an honest scholar, and Gasquet, one is forced to conclude, was not."

""Covenants without swords are but words." Thus did Hobbes sum up, typically, one of the more elementary and depressing truths of political science. At the root of save all the most primitive or the most celestial of social organizations there must lie the sanction of force: force not to create right but to uphold it; force to assure order, to cow rebellion at home and to subdue enemies abroad. That it is not in itself the foundation of society, that it is only the one factor out of many which go to constitute a political community, has been emphasized by political thinkers at least since the days of St Augustine. But as yet no community of any degree of complexity has succeeded in existing without force, and the manner in which that force is organized and controlled will largely determine the political structure of the State."

"Michael Howard is an excellent and succinct writer and his book is very easy to read."

"The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment. The social and economic developments of the past fifty years had brought about a military as well an industrial revolution. The Prussians had kept abreast of it and France had not. Therein lay the basic cause of her defeat."

"An elegance of style which, since his much esteemed early work The Franco-Prussian War, has always distinguished his writing has not been achieved by a sacrifice of accuracy or relentless extension of his "wide learning", and his critical judgments – sometimes feline, sometimes ruthless – are usually cogent. More than that. I suppose that during recent decades nobody on either side of the Atlantic has so effectively brought military studies securely within the domain of the humane disciplines. If he has not civilized Bellona single-handed, he is primus inter pares."

"I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us."

"The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference."

"Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning — if you have enough of them."

"The first consideration on reaching Egypt was where to be housed. In those days there was no luxurious close to the ; if any one needed to live there, they must either live in a tomb or in the Arab village. As an English engineer had left a tomb fitted with door and shutters I was glad to get such accommodation. When I say a tomb, it must be understood to be the upper chamber where the Egyptian fed his ancestors with offerings, not the actual sepulchre. And I had three rooms, which had belonged to separate tombs originally ; the thin walls of rock which the economical Egyptian left between his cuttings, had been broken away, and so I had a doorway in the middle into my living-room, a window on one side for my bedroom, and another window opposite for a store-room. I resided here for a great part of two years; and often when in draughty houses, or chilly tents, I have wished myself back in my tomb. No place is so equable in heat and cold, as a room cut out in solid rock ; it seems as good as a fire in cold weather, and deliciously cool in the heat."

"In 1893-1894 I went to to search for remains of the dynastic race, which presumably had entered Egypt at that point from the Red Sea. In the lowest part of the temple foundations we found parts of three colossal figures of the local god , each with surface carvings of animals, &c. They obviously belonged to a far earlier art than anything known in Egypt, and all later discoveries confirm their being placed as the earliest works of the , long before the establishment of the . One figure is at Cairo, and two are in the Asmolean Museum at Oxford."

"In few kinds of work are the results so directly dependent on the personality of the worker as they are in excavating. The old saying that a man finds what he looks for in a subject, is too true; or if he has not enough insight to ensure finding what he looks for, it is at least sadly true that he does not find anything that he does not look for. Whether it be , , , or that excavators have been seeking, they have seldom preserved or cared for anything but their own limited object. Of late years the notion of digging merely for profitable spoil, or to yield a new excitement to the jaded, has spread unpleasantly—at least in Egypt. A concession to dig is sought much like a grant of a monastery at the : the man who has influence or push, a title or a trade connection, claims to try his luck at the spoils of the land. Gold digging has at least no moral responsibility, beyond the ruin of the speculator; but spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it, which those who do it may be charitably supposed to be too ignorant or unintelligent to see or realise."

"...The national narrative in Britain has been one of liberty, freedom, a freedom loving people, prosperity, peace, no conquests, no violence, no expropriation. A peaceful story from beginning to end. A transformation from barbarism to civilisation, but one that has been done in an extraordinary and English way. Which means recognising trouble when it’s coming and dealing with it before it happens, reforming in time, and therefore the slow march of progress. And that Whig story of English history is still phenomenally powerful."

"For me, the point of doing history has been about how understanding the past might help us to improve people’s lives in the present. You can see that so clearly in relation to women’s rights or in relation to racial inequality."

"Flinders Petrie had no school or university training. His mother was the only child of , a naval officer who served under Bligh of ', and later explored and surveyed much of the coast of Australia. This lady taught her son the rudiments of knowledge and imbued him at an early age with the love of collecting and studying Greek and Roman coins."

"I had an excellent conventional grammar school education, where I had a wonderful history teacher. That was very important; it instilled in me from an early age how important teaching was and what a difference it can make."

"It was an incredible learning curve, realising how historians tend to only see what they’re interested in."

"From the ' diggers, I secured a lot of seventy-five Attic s in perfect condition, which served to show the accuracy of the mint in Athens, for most of the coins would have passed our own mint standard."

"To the Egyptian the gods might be mortal; even , the sun-god, is said to have grown old and feeble, was slain, and , the great hunter of the heavens, killed and ate the gods. The mortality of gods has been dwelt on by ('), and the many instances of tombs of gods, and of the slaying of the deified man who was worshipped, all show that immortality was not a divine attribute. Nor was there any doubt that they might suffer while alive; one myth tells how Ra, as he walked on earth, was bitten by a magic serpent and suffered torments. The gods were also supposed to share in a life like that of man, not only in Egypt but in most ancient lands. Offerings of food and drink were constantly supplied to them, in Egypt laid upon the altars, in other lands burnt for a sweet savour."

"In 1880 … Petrie set out on an expedition to Egypt long contemplated and prepared for, but delayed in the fruitless hope that his father might accompany him. So the survey of the pyramids, begun with an open mind but in the end intended to settle once for all controversy about prophetic feet and inches, was undertaken almost single-handed, the only helper being an old Egyptian who, as a child, had served , and later and . When Petrie, after two winters in Egypt and a year’s work on the plans, submitted his account to the in 1883 Francis Galton reported so favourably on it that £100 was granted for publication. Galton continued his encouragement in subsequent years, and , who, with and others, had just founded the , insisted that this new body should give the young man an opportunity to excavate. Thus his excavations commenced when he was thirty; they continued, with very rare exceptions, every year for over fifty years."

"He found archaeology in Egypt a treasure hunt; he left it a science."

"Most people are having their racial and ethnic differences given back to them by their national or ethnic leaders as a way of controlling them and channelling their hopes - their dreams and their aspirations - towards goals that are defined by an indifferent and self-serving oligarchy. People are anxious. They feel that they need something else apart from these sham certainties. That’s certainly what I hope."

"We have to offer people a different way of looking at things that isn’t just a critique. The critique is fine as far as it goes, but people need help. They need a hand and we have to be imaginative enough to be able to speak to that need."

"Today, people don’t talk about black people eating Kit-e-Kat."

"Appropriation is the fundamental law of culture. I don’t feel threatened by the idea that people think I’m wrong or that they think they can do better. Let’s see if they can!"

"I grew up in London... My parents had been politically active in different ways, so I was influenced a lot by them. I grew up as a kid going on demonstrations in my pushchair, from anti-apartheid to “ban the bomb.” My mum was very involved, and my dad had been in the Communist Party. I suppose I came of age on the end of Black Power, and when I was doing my A levels, Black Power was in the air. I read Black Power literature and thought about all those sorts of issues. Obviously, 1968 was significant. Enoch Powell made his speech, and I was 12 years old then, so I was beginning to go out and the skinheads were around. At times, you had to run for your life or they would attack you in the street."

"These dates Mueller later insisted were minimum dates only, and latterly there has been a sort of tacit agreement... to date the composition of the Rigveda somewhere about 1400-1500 BC, but without any absolutely conclusive evidence."

"S. Piggott established the presence of a sophisticated type of vehicle with “one or two pairs of wheels with their axles... from the Rhine to the Indus by around 3000” (1992: 18)."

"In sum, however, the evidence from Baluchistan and from Sind and the Punjab is reasonably consistent in implying that at some period likely to have been before 1500 BCE (to use a convenient round figure), the long-established cultural traditions of North-Western India were rudely and ruthlessly interrupted by the arrival of a new people from the west. The burning of Baluchi villages and the equipment of the graves at Sahi Tump suggest that these new arrivals were predominantly conquerors who traveled light and adopted the pottery of the region in which they established themselves. In Sind, at Chanhudaro, a barbarian settlement appears [evidently the reference is to the Jhukar Culture] in the deserted ruins of the Harappan town, and here some local craftsmen may have remained to work for their alien masters, while the pottery suggests a resurgence of local, non-Harappan elements. At Mohenjo-daro, it seems clear that the civilization that had survived so long was already effete and on the wane when the raiders came, and at Harappa we know from the evidence of the rebuilding of the Citadel walls that the inhabitants were on the defensive in the last days of the city, though, these precautionary measures did not suffice to keep away the intruders, wherever they came from, who afterwards settled on the ruins and buried their dead in Cemetery H for generations."

"The method has its dangers—the great Sanskrit scholar A. B. Keith once remarked that by taking the linguistic evidence too literally, one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet, but not rain and hands!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"... Listen — Not to dour centuries of trudging, Marching, and taking orders; Today I have heard the feet of my country Breaking into a run."

"Among circuitboard crowsteps To be miniaturised is not small-minded. To love you needs more details than the Book of Kells — Your harbours, your photography, your democratic intellect Still boundless, chip of a nation."

"Thinking of Helensburgh, J. G. Frazer Revises flayings and human sacrifice; Abo of the Celtic Twilight, St Andrew Lang Posts him a ten-page note on totemism And a coloured fairy book."

"James Murray combs the dialect from his beard And files slips for his massive Dictionary."

"Ghetto-makars, tae the knackirs' Wi aw yir schemes, yir smug dour dreams O yir ain feet. Yi're beat By yon new Scoatlan loupin tae yir street..."

"Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheel-barrows and move them north To celebrate my mother's sewing-machine And her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling Iambs on an antique metal footplate."

"Semiconductor country, land crammed with intimate expanses, Your cities are superlattices, heterojunctive Graphed from the air, your cropmarked farmlands Are epitaxies of tweed."

"The model of a modern Prime Minister would be a kind of grotesque composite freak—someone with the dedication to duty of a Peel, the physical energy of a Gladstone, the detachment of a Salisbury, the brains of an Asquith, the balls of a Lloyd George, the word-power of a Churchill, the administrative gifts of an Attlee, the style of a Macmillan, the managerialism of a Heath, and the sleep requirements of a Thatcher. Human beings do not come like that."

"Mr. Asquith had decided that the time had come when his Ministry ought to be reconstituted on a national instead of a party basis. He had invited the Conservative leaders to enter into a coalition, and they had agreed, but on conditions. One condition was that Haldane should not be included. A discreditable newspaper campaign had attacked him as pro-German, although in fact no man in the whole country had more clearly realised the danger of a German aggression, and no man had done more than he, as Secretary of State at the War Office, to initiate great reforms in the organisation, expansion, and equipment of the army to prepare it for such an eventuality. Haldane had been for many years an intimate friend of Asquith's and was his closest political associate. Now he had to choose—for the condition was insisted upon—between inflicting upon him what he knew to be a cruel injustice, or else failing in his duty to construct a combined Government to carry on the war."

"In the year which is approaching, a century will have passed since the United States and the people of Canada and Great Britain terminated a great war by the Peace of Ghent. On both sides the combatants felt that war to be unnatural and one that should never have commenced. And now we have lived for nearly a hundred years, not only in peace, but also, I think, in process of coming to a deepening and yet more complete understanding of each other, and to the possession of common ends and ideals, ends and ideals which are natural to the Anglo-Saxon group, and to that group alone. It seems to me that within our community there is growing an ethical feeling which has something approaching to the binding quality of which I have been speaking"

"In the welter of sentimentality, amid which Great Britain might easily have mouldered into ruin, my valued colleague, Lord Haldane, presented a figure alike interesting, individual, and arresting. In speech fluent and even infinite he yielded to no living idealist in the easy coinage of sentimental phraseology. Here, indeed, he was a match for those who distributed the chloroform of Berlin. Do we not remember, for instance, that Germany was his spiritual home? But he none the less prepared himself, and the Empire, to talk when the time came with his spiritual friends in language not in the least spiritual. He devised the Territorial Army, which was capable of becoming the easy nucleus of national conscription, and which unquestionably ought to have been used for that purpose at the outbreak of war. He created the Imperial General Staff. He founded the Officers' Training Corps."