People From Oxford

"He's quite open as a human being. I love him."

"[I loved] the romance genre being given this platform — it’s always been seen as quite a lightweight literature. Of course, it’s fluffy because it’s accessible and it’s hopefully something that you can bathe in. But at the same time, it can really tap into very human, very private and very high-stakes human experiences."

"There’s a lot of pressure on romance, I think, because you have to be so truthful. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? You just want to find the truth in everything."

"He’s the nicest person you could ever hope to meet. But when he acts, he can have an edge, which can feel dangerous in a great way. An unpredictability."

"It is good to see a romance story getting the respect it deserves — people can relate because everyone gets the chance to fall in love at some point. Hopefully."

"But with every job I’ve done that I’ve really enjoyed, I’ve never really ‘seen’ myself in it. If you can see yourself in something, you’ve probably already worked out your performance or the why. But if there’s that friction, then it means you’re going to come up with something new."

"It's thrilling from beginning to end. And the last scene of Act I (which is now two guys) will completely shatter you, as well as it being one of the funniest scenes on record. All due to [Jonathan Bailey], the guy who plays Jamie, the Amy-equivalent."

"Jonny operates at a different voltage. He's a meteorite of fun with an incredible amount of energy and playfulness. Smoldering at one turn and then utterly innocent at the next, but all the time playing with this sense of untapped danger. That is the quality I love most about Jonny as a person and as a performer: his danger."

"Of course I thought that in order to be happy I needed to be straight. I reached a point where I thought, Fuck this, I'd much prefer to hold my boyfriend's hand in public or be able to put my own face picture on Tinder and not be so concerned about that than getting a part."

"I think there’s something incredibly sexy about consent generally."

"In 20 years, you don't want to be famous. You want a sustained career."

"I knew that I wanted to be visible about my sexuality, because in all the territories that Netflix goes out in, there might be a boy somewhere that goes, “Wait, what?” Which is what I didn’t have when I was young. All I know is that I’m happy to keep working really hard and if there are opportunities for representation, and to make that point, then that’s something I’ll always strive to do."

"Any actor who thinks they're a sex symbol? Cringe."

"When you’re working with a genre like romance, which is about something fundamental which connects all humans, it’s so important that we can allow everyone to see themselves in that story, and that wasn't necessarily there for me growing up."

"Oh my God, are you kidding? I’m not saying for one second that I’ve been this sort of candyfloss gay who has cartwheeled around London. It’s completely brutal. And at moments really confusing. [But] there’s absolutely no way I’m not going to be visibly out. Even four years ago there wasn’t any actor in my peer group, really, that you could see playing straight roles."

"Theatre has often saved the day for me and that’s why I’ll forever think I’m a theatre actor more than anything else."

"LGBT people are not that different - we're just as anxious and just as flawed and just as desperate to fall in love as everyone else."

"Theatre is all about people. You can love a play and character and can be the right person to tell that story. But if you don’t click with the other people in the play, it won’t work."

"I was aged about five and I went to see Oliver!. I remember announcing to my family something very cliched like, I want to be up there one day."

"It’s about redressing the balance of access to roles. There just aren’t that many gay roles, so when straight actors go to take that space up, it’s eliminating the chance for other [gay actors]. We know there has been a history of needing to be closeted to succeed and be famous, especially in acting. And the idea of not being able to believe heterosexual relations and narrative, if you know one of the actors is gay… everyone should be able to play absolutely everything. But let’s blow away all the cobwebs, and one of the hang-ups and shadows of the past is that we need to be a lot more open to the idea of sexes playing different sides. There have been amazing performances by straight people playing gay and by gay people playing straight."

"Leadership is about authenticity and transparency. And being there. Being there as much as you can. There's a fearlessness to it."

"It is a private matter [sexuality], but if there are opportunities to say something . . . I wonder if, if it would be beneficial to someone else, that responsibility is on you. It’s complicated."

"I've never gone in as the overdog, and that's liberating and I don't want that to ever change. I just want to allow my own experiences to come through."

"I have three older sisters who definitely encouraged me to lark around. I’m pretty sure they spent their Sundays dressing me up (in suitably androgynous clothing) and forcing me to sing Sister Sledge. They were my heroes growing up."

"I’ve never doubted I would have children. It’s not something I’ve ever wavered on."

"Any attempt to extrapolate from the minimal evidence available a thesis as to Athelstan’s sexuality would be as anachronistic as it was nugatory."

"Bishop Æthelwold spoke for all those who, enjoying the order brought to lands that only decades before had been scenes of carnage and devastation, felt due gratitude for what had been achieved by Alfred and his heirs. He, close enough in time to Athelstan’s reign to have been the great king’s protégé, understood the full scale of his debt. We, at a millennium’s remove, could perhaps remember it better."

"Rare was the royal genealogy that had not born witness to the fecundity of Woden."

"Certainly, it can come as a jolt to discover that, with a single exception, we have no extant descriptions of the Battle of Badr that date from before the ninth century AD. We do not even have Ibn Ishaq’s original biography of Muhammad—only revisions and reworkings. As for the material on which Ibn Ishaq himself drew upon for his researches, it has long since vanished. Set against the triumphal hubbub raised by Arab historians in the ninth century, let alone the centuries that followed, the silence is deafening and perplexing. The precise state of play bears spelling out. Over the course of almost two hundred years, the Arabs, a people never noted for their reticence, and whose motivation, we are told, had been an utterly consuming sense of religious certitude, had set themselves to conquering the world—and yet in all that time, they composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day. How could this possibly have been so, when even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation, even in Britain, even in the north of England, books of history were being written during this same period, and copied, and lovingly tended? Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death? Even the sole exception to the rule—a tiny shred of papyrus discovered in Palestine and dated to around AD 740—serves only to compound the puzzle."

"Estates brought Edward wealth, which enabled him to display generosity to those who support he needed; military commands had given him experience in war, without which no king could hope to maintain his rule."

"Far from Islam having been born in the full light of history, its birth was shrouded in what has appeared, to an increasing number of scholars, an almost impenetrable darkness. To be sure, there are very few scholars who would go so far as to claim that the Prophet never existed. Someone by the name of Muhammad does certainly appear to have intruded upon the consciousness of his near-contemporaries."

"Yazidis [were] shot and thrown like refuse into pits; men and boys beheaded in front of their families; girls as young as eight subjected to gang rape; beatings; forced conversions; torture; slavery. In a camp I visited, a woman who had been raped for an entire year, then shot in the head when her owner grew tired of her, then finally sold back to her husband, lay curled in a foetal ball in a makeshift tent, rocking and moaning to herself."

"Certainly, it can come as a jolt to discover that, with a single exception, we have no extant descriptions of the Battle of Badr that date from before the ninth century AD.... What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation? A battle on a valley’s edge won against terrifying odds; angels swooping down to strike at infidel necks; plunder seized from routed caravans: the holy text certainly alludes to all these things. Yet, aside from a single name-check, Badr itself is never mentioned.52 There is certainly no confirmation that a great battle—such as the one described by Ibn Hisham—was ever fought there. Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history."

"Nobody in the West really gives a shit. And the reason nobody gives a shit, as a Yazidi refugee I spoke to said, is that in the West you have Christians, you have Muslims, you have Jews who all speak up for their co-religionists, but who cares about the Yazidi? Who cares about them?"

"That a union as long-lasting as that of Great Britain might fray can hardly help but serve as a reminder that the joining of different peoples in a shared sense of identity is not something easily achieved and maintained."

"The story of how, over the course of three generations, the royal dynasty of Wessex went from near-oblivion to fashioning a kingdom that still endures today is the most remarkable and momentous in British history. That Athelstan, let alone Edward and Æthelflæd, are perforce shadowy figures, with inner lives that are as unknowable to us as the site of Brunanburh, does not render their accomplishments any the less astonishing. They and Alfred richly merit being commemorated as England’s founding fathers – or, of course, in Æthelflæd’s case, as England’s founding mother."

"To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity."

"Favours and the threat of force: such, as they had ever been, were the essence of successful kingship."

"The people you step over when you come out of the opera."

"It would be obviously unfair to describe the Chinese people as wanting in humour simply because they are tickled by jests which leave us comparatively unmoved. Few of our own most amusing stories will stand conversion into Chinese terms."

"It was on his return journey that Pao-yü's father heard of the success and disappearance of his son. Torn by conflicting emotions he hurried on, in his haste to reach home and aid in unravelling the secret of Pao-yü's hiding-place. One moonlight night, his boat lay anchored alongside the shore, which a storm of the previous day had wrapped in a mantle of snow. He was sitting writing at a table, when suddenly, through the half-open door, advancing towards him over the bow of the boat, his silhouette sharply defined against the surrounding snow, he saw the figure of a shaven-headed Buddhist priest. The priest knelt down, and struck his head four times upon the ground, and then, without a word, turned back to join two other priests who were awaiting him. The three vanished as imperceptibly as they had come; before, indeed, the astonished father was able to realise that he had been, for the last time, face to face with Pao-yü!"

"A Chinese poem is at best a hard nut to crack."

"[The Tao-Tê-Ching] is interesting as a collection of many genuine utterances of Lao Tzŭ, sandwiched however between thick wads of padding from which little meaning can be extracted except by enthusiasts who curiously enough disagree absolutely among themselves."

"Flowers fade and fly, and flying fill the sky; Their bloom departs, their perfume gone, yet who stands pitying by? ... Oh, let me sadly bury them beside these steps to-night! ... Farewell, dear flowers, for ever now, thus buried as 'twas best, I have not yet divined when I with you shall sink to rest. I who can bury flowers like this a laughing-stock shall be; I cannot say in days to come what hands shall bury me. See how when spring begins to fail each opening floweret fades; So too there is a time of age and death for beauteous maids; And when the fleeting spring is gone, and days of beauty o'er, Flowers fall, and lovely maidens die, and both are known no more."

"It must however always be borne in mind that translators are but traitors at the best, and that translations may be moonlight and water while the originals are sunlight and wine."

"Dear Land of Flowers, forgive me!—that I took These snatches from thy glittering wealth of song, And twisted to the uses of a book Strains that to alien harps can ne'er belong.Thy gems shine purer in their native bed Concealed, beyond the pry of vulgar eyes; And there, through labyrinths of language led, The patient student grasps the glowing prize.Yet many, in their race toward other goals, May joy to feel, albeit at second-hand, Some far faint heart-throb of poetic souls Whose breath makes incense in the Flowery Land."

"During the four hundred years of Han supremacy the march of civilization went steadily forward. Paper and ink were invented, and also the camel's-hair brush, both of which gave a great impetus to the arts of writing and painting."

"My fossils, ferns and porcelain (i.e. my hobbies) are an island of sanity in a mad world, an island found by others of my profession who devote a quiet hour to their postmarks, butterflies, stamps or poetry. My palaeontology was a sure restoration of equanimity after the frustrations of working for and with some politicians."

"Physics, chemistry, astrophysics are obviously the ideal field for the tidy mind ...in the biological and geological sciences the tidy mind often goes astray and the passive, unmathematical approach may be more suitable. ...The sciences that deal with natural process, geology or geography, or with life, zoology or botany, have an immensely more complicated task than physics or chemistry. ... A particular danger, I believe, lies in an oversimplified use of mathematical or statistical methods of investigation, in which obviously erroneous results may be obtained by a selection of only a few of many relevant factors to be considered."

"You know my philosophy is that the world is a big place so if you get the chance to live abroad lessons in life it gives you are like no other. I moved to Cascais when I was one and a half. I do feel very fortunate that I grew up in a Latin culture and learnt another language. When I approach a character or a script I can approach it from different points of view, with maybe a more international perspective."