Fellows Of The British Academy

"Marian devotion is very deeply embedded in Ultramontane papalist Catholicism, and has been for centuries. The Virgin in the nineteenth century, apparitions of the Virgin, play an enormous part in focusing Catholic loyalty, Catholic identity, and also in offering a dimension of Christianity... If you've got a very rigid, hierarchical, masculinely-dominated form of Christianity, the tender, nurturing, feminine element in Christianity can only be rescued by some sort of balancing act. This I think was an enormous strength in nineteenth century Catholicism over and against say nineteenth century Fundamentalist Evangelicalism - with which it has a great deal in common in some respects - but where I think it has an edge is in this feminine dimension."

"Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars takes its place besides A. G. Dickens' The English Reformation as a landmark book in the history of the Reformation, and with this book the author assumes commanding rank in the revisionist camp."

"The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge and a former president of Magdalene College, is the most important study of our time in the field of early modern English religious history. It has completely changed our view of the reception of Protestant theology under the Tudors."

"Duffy's aim is to redress an old historiographical imbalance. He has admirably succeeded in this, even if at the cost of another imbalance. This is, as it stands, a very illuminating and satisfying book, which takes a major step towards better understanding of the English Reformation."

"I do not think there is a Christian shape to history in the sense that things move according to God's plan in any discernible way. I think a Christian approaches history with a sense that human life matters and has meaning and that it is both possible and important to tell the truth. Perhaps that constitutes a Christian approach to history because none of those things can be taken for granted now, even among people practicing history. There are people who practice history who think that it is a branch of the creative arts in the sense that we impose patterns on the past. I believe that we discover patterns in the past."

"The most beautiful history book of the year is Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570... Eamon Duffy examines surviving copies of the Book of Hours, the most intimate book of the late Middle Ages, tracing the marks left by readers — everything from laundry lists scribbled in the margins to personalised versions of prayers. This richly illustrated book takes us back into the hearts and souls of the English long ago."

"Experimental Science is represented by Bacon, in the sixth part of the Opus Maius, as a general method for the purpose of checking the results reached by mathematical processes, and also of prompting further researches in fresh fields of inquiry. He saw its bearing and its importance as a universal method of research."

"In Petrarch we readily recognise a link between the mediaeval and the modern world. He was fully conscious of belonging in a peculiar sense to a transitional time. He describes himself as placed on the confines of two peoples, and as looking backwards as well as forwards ..."

"Steaming onwards to the south-east between Methana and Ægina, we passed close under the island of Poros, with its hilly slopes clothed with groves of citron, an island which once bore the name of Calaureia, and was the scene of the death of Demosthenes. It was here that he sought sanctuary from the emissaries of Antipater in the temple of Poseidon."

"'Philology' was for a long time limited to linguistic studies, and was regarded as only including grammar, lexicography, exegesis, and textual and literary criticism; but, since the time of Wolf, it has been generally understood in a wider sence, as including the study of ancient life in all its phases, as handed down to us in the literature, the inscriptions, and the monuments, of Greece and Rome ..."

"Lewis established his reputation as a scholar with his first book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Traditions (1936). This remains a great and profoundly original contribution to literary history. Whether one agrees or disagrees, in detail or in large, with its thesis, after reading this book one's whole imagination of the past has been extended and changed. Lewis recovered for the ordinary reader what had been lost for centuries, the power to read allegory and to respond to the allegorical mode of thinking. He was able to do so because he was a born allegorist himself."

"Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection, one of the most popular books of devotion in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has a long discussion on three ways of loving God."

"The term 'metaphysical poets' came into being long after the poets to whom we apply it were dead. Samuel Johnson, who coined it, did so with the consciousness that it was a piece of literary slang, that he was giving it a kind of nickname."

"The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman are distinguished from Eliot's earlier plays by their author's obvious desire to accomodate himself to the conventions of the stage at their most conventional level. In the earlier plays, Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion, Eliot was working in the experimental theatre of the 'thirties, using such devices as the chorus, the direct appeal to the audience, soliloquy, lyrical solos and duets, and ritual and symbolic acts. In these last plays he deliberately wrote within the limits of what has been contemptuously called the "West End Play", or what Mr. Terence Rattigan called "Plays for Aunt Edna"."

"What was the modern movement in English and American literature has now passed into history. We have to call it the 'modernist movement'. Its great figures—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens—are now well entrenched in academic syllabuses. The vultures and the crows have moved in over the old battlefields. Writers who once aroused a passionate enthusiasm and as passionate a disapproval are now the prey of bibliographers and textual critics, biographers and editors of letters, and students seeking doctorates."

"Pathology is the place where history talks with its loudest most grating voice."

"There is no third path and that is the one we are going to take."

"Leon Walras, the sun of one of the planetary systems in the universe of economics, developed a general equilibrium model of capital formation and credit, after he had explored models of exchange and production. But he was primarily concerned with momentary equilibrium to be established in a system with given stocks of capital goods that are shared among a given number of individuals."

"The later Morishima’s dissatisfaction with the false sense of completed achievement―and the related smugness―of many pure theorists did make sense, and he was right to emphasize the need to seek constantly a fuller picture which could do justice to the reality around us, rather than seeing their separated investigations as the end of their task. All the constructive insights that the later Morishima offers become relevant when that exercise of broadening is undertaken. And yet, this does not require us to dismiss the nature of the contribution that the early Morishima made, or discard the contributions that old-fashioned economic theory has made and still makes to our understanding of the world. In defence of the latter claim, I offer the fact that even the highly oversimplified General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of that great abstractionist, John Maynard Keynes (1936), made a significant difference to public policy. I could refer also to the fact that, when Michio was trying to expand the education of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he had no hesitation in bringing in some results of fairly pure Marxian economic theory to the attention of a person with a very powerful voice in the real world; and Robert Runcie himself appreciated this fully. The relation between useful abstraction and underlying reality requires, I would argue, an enduringly dual approach."

"In the summer of 1975, I read Marx’s Economics by Michio Morishima (1973), a Japanese mathematical Marxist economist. I was excited by this book, for Morishima was using the tools I had learned in mathematical economics to study Marxist questions: exploitation, the labor theory of value, the transformation problem."

"we could do a great deal worse than look back across the drift to the great reader Lewis. We need to try to recall what literature was; what it meant, and can still mean, to grasp literary works in memory."

"A great teacher and a great writer need not be an efficient supervisor."

"One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan”"

"The city, so far from being an unarmed sanctuary of peace, was dominated by the towers and battlements of a lofty man‐made acropolis of defiantly feudal aspect. A few minutes’ observation had radically changed the social character of the Indus civilization and put it at last into an acceptable secular focus. (Wheeler, 1955: 192)"

"Wheeler (1968, 3rd edition) proposed the following: It is, simply, this. Sometime during the second millennium B.C. – the middle of the millennium has been suggested, without serious support – Aryan-speaking peoples invaded the Land of Seven Rivers, the Punjab and its neighboring region. It has long been accepted that the tradition of this invasion is reflected in the older hymns of the Rigveda, the composi- tion of which is attributed to the second half of the millennium. In the Rigveda, the invasion constantly assumes the form of an onslaught upon walled cities of the aborigines. For these cities, the term used is pur, meaning a “rampart,” “fort,” “stronghold.” One is called “broad” ( prithvi) and “wide” (urvi). Sometimes strongholds are referred to metaphorically as “of metal” (dyasi). “Autumnal” (saradi) forts are also named: “this may refer to the forts in that season being occupied against the Aryan attacks or against inundations caused by overflowing rivers.” Forts “with a hundred walls” (satabhuji) are mentioned. The citadel may be of stone (afmanmayi): alternatively, the use of mud-bricks is perhaps alluded to by the epithet ama (raw, unbaked); Indra, the Aryan war-god is purandara, “fort-destroyer.” He shatters “ninety forts” for his Aryan protégé, Divodasa. The same forts are doubtless referred to where in other hymns he demolishes variously ninety-nine and a hundred “ancient castles” of the aboriginal leader Sambara. In brief, he renders “forts as age consumes garment.” If we reject the identification of the fortified citadels of the Harappans with those which the Aryans destroyed, we have to assume that, in the short interval which can, at the most, have intervened between the end of the Indus civilization and the first Aryan invasions, an unidentified but formidable civilization arose in the same region and presented an extensive fortified front to the invaders. It seems better, as the evidence stands, to accept the identification and to suppose that the Harappans of the Indus valley in their decadence, in or about the seventeenth century BC, fell before the advancing Aryans in such fashion as the Vedic hymns proclaim: Aryans who nevertheless, like other rude conquerors of a later date, were not too proud to learn a little from the conquered . . . (1968: 131–2)"

"The Aryan invasion of the Land of Seven Rivers, the Punjab and its envi- rons, constantly assumes the form of an onslaught upon the walled cities of the aborigines. For these cities the term used in the ¸igveda is pur, mean- ing a “rampart,” “fort” or “stronghold.” . . . Indra, the Aryan War god, is puraydara, “fort-destroyer.” He shatters “ninety forts” for his Aryan protégé Divodasa. [. . .] Where are – or were – these citadels? It has in the past been supposed that they were mythical, or were “merely places of refuge against attack, ramparts of hardened earth with palisades and a ditch.” The recent exca- vation of Harappa may be thought to have changed the picture. Here we have a highly evolved civilization of essentially non-Aryan type, now known to have employed massive fortifications, and known also to have dominated the river-system of north-western India at a time not distant from the likely period of the earlier Aryan invasions of that region. What destroyed this firmly settled civilization? Climatic, economic, political deterioration may have weakened it, but its ultimate extinction is more likely to have been completed by deliberate and large-scale destruction. It may be no mere chance that at a late period of Mohenjo-daro men, women and children appear to have been massacred there. On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused."

"Archaeology is not a science, it’s a vendetta."

"‘For a civilization so widely distributed as that of the Indus no uniform ending need be postulated.’"

"The anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappa remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable to the present day."

"Wheeler used all his talents and literary skill to Prove that the Indus Valley Civilization was the outcome of the Mesopotamian experiment in city-life; at one place he even goes to the extent of suggesting that the mastercraftsmen came from a foreign country to Mohenjodaro to build the first houses ! In other words, he looked at this civilization not as a ‘primary’ civilization, like that of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, developing on its own soil and produced by its own genius, but as a secondary civilization built by the foreigners,"

"One important legacy of Wheeler's influence is an a priori acceptance by scholars of the use of migration and stimulus diffusion to describe all major South Asian discontinuities - beginning with the invention of agriculture and ending with the arrival of the British. Alternative explanations of cultural change are not considered. Wheeler's interpretations promoted an encapsulation of South Asian culture history into a series of chronologically and culturally distinct units focused on northern areas. It the became difficult to perceive or reconstruct a cultural account incorporating an integrated sub-continent. Recent archaeological data suggests fundamental interpretive changes are now warranted."

"Given the charge of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944, when he was a brigadier in the British army fighting in North Africa, he revived the ASI and institutionalized a more rigorous stratigraphic method designed to record a site’s evolution period after period. Irascible but magnanimous, theatrical but hard-working, Wheeler energetically put his stamp on Indian archaeology. But having received his archaeological training in the context of the Roman Empire, he transferred its terminology wholesale to the Harappan cities, which thus became peppered with ‘citadels’, ‘granaries’, ‘colleges’, ‘defence walls’, etc., when no one, in reality, had a clue to the precise purpose of the massive structures that had emerged from the thick layers of accumulated mud."

"Since India’s and Pakistan’s independence, South Asian archaeology was significantly influenced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (born 1890, died 1976) and, to a lesser degree, by the late Stuart Piggott. Wheeler secured a reputation as one of the most prominent archaeologists in the English speaking world.... If Jones’ had his “philologer paragraph,” Wheeler had his “Aryan paragraphs” which directed archaeological, historical, linguistic, and biological interpretations within South Asian studies for over a half century."

"One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that a jawbone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in Baluchistan."

"One terracotta, from a late level at Mohenjo-daro , seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan." He" notes as well, after referring to the bone of a camel recovered from a low level at Mohenjo-daro: "There is no evidence of any kind for the use of the ass or mule. On the other hand the bones of a horse occur at a high level at Mohenjo-daro , and from the earlier (doubtless pre-Harappan) layer at Rana Ghundai in northern Baluchistan both horse and ass are recorded. It is likely enough that camel, horse and ass were in fact all a familiar feature of the Indus caravans."

"Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to [Aurel] Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus."

"Marshall thus provided the foundation for a regional myth in India to assist perhaps innocently the 'divide and rule' policy of British Imperialism."

"Taken as a whole, their [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as *hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism….* One thing that ‘stands out both at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped on Indian soil, with many millennia of human endeavour behind it."

"Hitherto it has commonly been supposed that the pre‐Aryan peoples of India were on an altogether lower plane of civilization than their Aryan conquerors … Never for a moment was it imagined that five thousand years ago, before ever the Aryans were heard of, the Panjab and Sind, if not other parts of India as well, were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own, closely akin but in some respects even superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet this is what the discoveries at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have now placed beyond question. (Marshall, 1931: v)"

"There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens."

"Indians have always been justly proud of their age-old civilization and believing that this civilization was as ancient as any in Asia, they have long been hoping that archaeology would discover definite monumental evidence to justify their belief. This hope has now been fulfilled."

"These discoveries establish the existence in Sind (the northernmost province of the Bombay Presidency) and the Punjab, during the fourth and third millennium B.C., of a highly developed city life; and the presence, in many of the houses, of wells and bathrooms as well as an elaborate drainage-system, betoken a social condition of the citizens at least equal to that found in Sumer, and superior to that prevailing in contemporary Babylonia and Egypt. . . . Even at Ur the houses are by no means equal in point of construction to those of Mohenjo-daro."

"It doesn’t take much refection—and indeed only a little research—to discover that the kind of conservative readings of the Genesis story that are often put up in opposition to what it is thought Darwin said (often without bothering to read what Darwin himself had to say) bear almost no relation to what we find in the refection of the fathers on the account found in Genesis. Such Christians have imagined a tradition that has no right to call itself tradition."

"We should never forget that Gautama was born and brought up a Hindu and lived and died a Hindu. His teaching, far-reaching and original as it was, and really subversive of the religion of the day, was Indian throughout. He was the greatest and wisest and best of the Hindus."

"In his researches, Grünendahl (2012:194) has checked Rhys-Davids’ writings and discovered a telling example of how the racialist “NS” worldview was already present in Britain earlier: “However, a more important factor seems to me to be Rhys Davids’s racialist—or more precisely Aryanist—bias, documented, for example, in statements to the effect that Gautama Buddha ‘was the only man of our own race, the only Aryan, who can rank as the founder of a great religion’ and that therefore ‘the whole intellectual and religious development of which Buddhism is the final outcome was distinctively Aryan, and Buddhism is the one essentially Aryan faith’ (1896:185), which ‘took its rise among an advancing and conquering people full of pride in their colour and their race... ‘(1896:187).”"

"[Gautama Buddha] ‘was the only man of our own race, the only Aryan, who can rank as the founder of a great religion’ [and that therefore] ‘the whole intellectual and religious development of which Buddhism is the final outcome was distinctively Aryan, and Buddhism is the one essentially Aryan faith’ (1896:185), [which] ‘took its rise among an advancing and conquering people full of pride in their colour and their race… ‘ (1896:187).”"

"A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, in quick succession, but he may also exercise power over him by shaping or determining his very wants. Indeed, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have – that is, to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?"

"In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one."

"Since the 1970s, interest in economic methodology has grown dramatically, to the extent that it is now possible to view methodology as a clearly identifiable sub-discipline within economics."

"As the title of his 1941 book indicates, the theory of capital lay at the heart of his theory of the cycle. The reason is that he attributes the cycle not to changes in aggregate demand, or even to changes in the quantity of capital, but to changes in the structure of production and hence the structure of the capital stock. In this, his theory was highly unusual: one of the reasons for his failure to engage more effectively with Keynes was the latter’s inability to see how the theory of capital could be of any importance for the cycle. Because the theory of capital is so central, and because it is so complex, it needs to be explained carefully. After that, the rest of his theory falls into place comparatively easily."