University Of Cambridge Faculty

"In the post-Roman West personal diplomacy was more normal, for instance when family members were vying to divide up a kingdom, as portrayed dramatically in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear. A notable example was the series of summits in Carolingian France after the death of Louis the Pious, particularly those at Verdun in 843 and Meersen in 870. The outlines of these territorial settlements were laboriously thrashed out months in advance by commissioners who surveyed the terrain and gathered data. But plenty of scope still remained for face-to-face haggling by the principals—their in-person meetings guaranteed the agreements by an exchange of oaths and sometimes of hostages. On other occasions, summits concluded carefully prepared peace agreements, as when Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III met in Venice in 1177. This conference took place on neutral territory; others, as with late Roman practice, were conducted in the borderlands. In either case, the location was chosen to ensure the status and/or security of each ruler."

"It became normal to have at each of the major courts a resident "ambassador"—a word defined by the English poet and diplomat Sir Henry Wotton in a punning epigram as “a man sent to lie abroad for his country’s good.” Given the time required for travel, and the hazards en route—especially in an age of dynastic and religious warfare—permanent ambassadors offered a convenient substitute for personal summitry. And their detailed reports required the attention of specialist secretaries who oversaw foreign affairs, such as Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan London or Antonio Perez at the court of Philip III. Day-to-day diplomacy tended to slip out of the hands of rulers."

"Throughout history, security as much as status has been an obstacle to summitry. In 1419 France was in turmoil from war with the English and a power struggle provoked by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI. On September 10 the dauphin, Charles’ son, conferred on a bridge near Rouen with their archrival, John, Duke of Burgundy. Both men were well attended by guards and a barrier had been erected in the middle, with a wicket gate bolted on either side to allow passage only by mutual consent. During the conference Duke John was persuaded to come through the gate—only to be cut down by the dauphin’s bodyguard. The dauphin, inheriting the throne as Charles VII, recovered much of France from the English. When his son, Louis XI, met the Yorkist king Edward IV at Picquigny near Amiens in 1475 to conclude a peace treaty, the fate of Duke John was much in mind. The chronicler Philippe de Commines tells how this conference was held on a bridge over the Somme. Louis insisted that across the middle of the bridge and along its sides his carpenters should build "a strong wooden lattice, such as lions’ cages are made with, the hole between each bar being no wider than to thrust in a man’s arm." The two kings somehow managed to embrace between the holes and conducted their meeting in secure cordiality."

"The importance of status is vividly illustrated by perhaps the most celebrated summit in German history: the meeting at Canossa in 1077 between Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. In German this is known as der Canossagang, the journey to Canossa; more aptly in Italian as l’umiliazione di Canossa, for it was truly a humiliation. In the Investiture Controversy—the power struggle between pope and emperor over the right to appoint bishops—Henry had renounced Gregory as pope, only to find himself excommunicated. This papal edict not only imperilled Henry’s immortal soul, it also laid him open to revolt by the German nobility. He sought a meeting with Gregory who, fearing violence, retreated to the castle of Canossa, in safe territory south of Parma. This forced the emperor to come to him. What exactly happened is shrouded in legend, but supposedly Henry arrived in the depths of winter, barefoot and in a pilgrim’s hair shirt, only to be kept waiting by Gregory for three days. When he was finally admitted to the castle on January 28, 1077, the emperor knelt before the pope and begged forgiveness. He was absolved and the two most powerful figures in Christendom then shared the Mass. The reconciliation was short-lived. After being excommunicated a second time Henry crossed the Alps with his army and replaced Gregory with an “antipope” of his own. But the events themselves matter less than the myth that grew up around them. During the German Reformation Henry was lionized as the defender of national rights and the scourge of the Catholic pope, often being dubbed “the first Protestant.” And during Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s struggle to rein in the Catholic church, he famously declared in the Reichstag on May 14, 1872: “We will not go to Canossa, neither in body nor in spirit.” He was voicing the new German Reich’s resolve to accept no outside interference in its affairs—political or religious. As a result Henry IV shivering outside the gates of Canossa became a familiar figure in late-nineteenth-century German art; the phrase “to go to Canossa” (nach Canossa gehen) entered the language as a synonym for craven surrender—almost the equivalent of "Munich" to the British and Americans."

"In the heyday of the Byzantine Empire its rulers tried to manage affairs from Constantinople, either bringing foreign rulers to their court or conducting negotiations by letters and by envoys who acted as the self-styled "voice of kings." In 1096 and 1097 the emperor Alexis Comnenos made a point of meeting the leaders of the First Crusade in his own palace, as did Manuel Comnenos when the Second Crusade arrived in 1147. But when Byzantium spiralled into decline in the fourteenth century, its emperors became as mobile as those of the late Roman Empire, and much less potent. Emperor Manuel II was reduced to touring the courts of Italy, France, Germany and England for help against the Ottoman Turks, handing out precious books and pieces of the supposed tunic of Christ as inducements. This was the diplomacy of desperation: Byzantium fell to the Turks in 1453, less than thirty years after Manuel’s death."

"The origins of diplomacy date back at least to the Bronze Age in the Near East. Caches of documents from the Euphrates kingdom in the mid–eighteenth century BC and from Akhenaten’s Egypt four centuries later reveal a regular exchange of envoys with neighboring states, prompted by the need for trade and the danger of war. This was hardly a fully fledged diplomatic "system." Envoys were not resident ambassadors and they were not protected by agreed rules of immunity—but it was a recognizable form of diplomacy."

"Memoræ sacrum Joanni Still Episcopo Bathoniensi et Wellensi, Sacræ Theologia Doctori Acerrimo Christianæ Veritatis propugnatori non nienus vitæ integritate quam veria Doctrina claro qui cum Domino Diu vigilasset in Christo spe certa resurgendi obdormivit die XXVI. Februarii . Vixit annos LXIIII sedit episcopus XVI. Nathaniel Still filius primogenitus optimo patri Mœrens pietatis ergo posuit."

"A ship is sooner rigged by far, than a gentlewoman made ready."

"Catch occasion by the foretop."

"A theory which cannot be mortally endangered cannot be alive."

"For indeed it is one of the lessons of the history of science that each age steps on the shoulders of the ages which have gone before. The value of each age is not its own, but is in part, in large part, a debt to its forerunners. And this age of ours, if, like its predecessors, it can boast of something of which it is proud, would, could it read the future, doubtless find much also of which it would be ashamed."

"Although subsequent generations of Christians would become almost fixated by Jesus’ reputation as a miracle worker and produced ever more elaborate and fantastical traditions, there are good reasons to look closely at the earliest records of this activity."

"If more New Testament scholars could be encouraged to recognise that they are already, to some extent, engaged in psychological analysis of the historical Jesus, and that they are already, as a matter of course, examining data of real potential psychological significance, much could be gained."

"Indeed, if we decide, with Voltaire, that at least some contemporary advocates of the non-historicity of Jesus are really "more ingenious than learned", taking this question seriously may, at the very least, prove beneficial in raising the standard of debate and the wider understanding — in fact, even self-understanding — of what New Testament scholars do and how they do it."

"So, over the years, I was regularly asked such things as: Did Jesus exist? Was he mad? Did he ever heal anybody? And the essays included here, to a significant extent, reflect my attempts to answer them. In the world of continuing education, no questions are inadmissible, and no answers, as long as they are carefully and critically argued, are unacceptable."

"And thou New-England, which art exalted in privileges of the Gospel above many other people, know thou the time of thy visitation, and consider the great things the Lord hath done for thee. The Gospel hath free passage in all places where thou dwellest; oh that it might be glorified also by thee! ... The Lord looks for more from thee, than from other people; more zeal for God, more love to his truth, more justice and equity in thy ways. Thou shouldst be a special people, an only people, none like thee in all the earth."

"What does this mean for the origin of the Indic languages, and by extension, the origin of the Indic civilization? My answer is, I am afraid, inconclusive. From the linguistic data alone, without taking into account the evidence of archaeology or early texts, it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, or even the age of the language family. The Indo-European model, as a model of language relationships and of linguistic descent, tells us nothing certain about the origin of the Indic civilization."

"Thus, in the case of Indo-European language relationships, it is possible to make the argument that the creation of a hypothesis relating the languages of Northern India to those of Europe was initially created and promulgated by nineteenth century scholars in order to promote agendas of colonialism or racism."

"From the linguistic data alone... it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of PIE, or even the age of the language family."

"In summary the Indo-Europeanist’s data and method do not allow the question ‘When was PIE spoken?’ to be answered in any really meaningful or helpful way."

"We all invent ourselves as we go along, and a great man's myths about himself merely tend to stick better than most."

"A country has the kind of army its total ethos, its institutions, resources, habits of peaceful life, make possible to it. The American army is the army of a country which is law-respecting without being law-abiding. It is the army of a country which, having lavish natural wealth provided for it and lavish artificial wealth created by its own efforts, is extravagant and wasteful. It is the army of a country in which melodramatic pessimism is often on the surface but below it is the permanent optimism of a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America. It is the army of a country whose national motto has been "root, hog, or die." When convinced that death is the alternative, the hog roots."

"The combination of a profound hatred of war and militarism with an innocent delight in playing soldiers is one of these apparent contradictions of American life that one has to accept."

"For Americans, war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis—an American decision that this war is sport, or that it is business."

"If we are to consider what holds the South back from the modern world in so graceless and often base a way, we must allow for the survival of the Confederate legend. This legend is now less an heroic memory than poison in the blood; it recalls less Chancellorsville, or even Nashville, than Oxford, Mississippi, with Ross Barnett as the poor man's Jefferson Davis."

"After the Civil War any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats."

"It is, I have been told, one of the most formidable of Chinese imprecations to wish that your enemy lived "in interesting times." We live in very interesting times; times not to be made better by any simple formula. Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning."

"American social fences have to be continually repaired; in England they are like wild hedges; they grow if left alone."

"The basic Canadian relationship is not either with the United States or with the United Kingdom, but with the world of the hydrogen bomb. The very fact that Canada is now one of the treasure-houses of the world makes the naive isolationism of the inter-war years...impossible. A uranium-producing country cannot be neutral."

"Contrary to the implications of the open letter, I have never actually done any original research on racial or population differences in intelligence. The only contribution I have made to this area of study is a research ethics paper arguing that “it cannot simply be taken for granted that, when in doubt, stifling debate around taboo topics is the ethical thing to do”. While this paper does not claim that genes do contribute to group differences in intelligence, it does entertain the possibility that they could contribute to such differences."

"The fact that a group of more than 200 academics have branded a young scholar a racist and accused him of academic malpractice, without offering any evidence to back up these allegations, is a scandal. It is typical of the underhand tactics used by the Left to discredit those who don’t subscribe to progressive orthodoxy – particularly the ‘blank slate’ orthodoxy – and helps explain why there are so few conservatives in the social sciences and the humanities. St Edmund’s College should treat this smear campaign with the contempt it deserves."

"If these by hope doe joye in their distresse, And constant are, in hope to conquer tyme, Then let not hope in us (sweete friend) be lesse, And cause our love to wither in the Pryme.Let us conspyre, and time will have an end, So both of us in time shall have a frend."

"Both poles we burnt, whereon the world doeth turne, The rownd of heaven, from earth unto the skies: And nowe the seas we both intend to burne: I with my bowe, and Licia with her eyes."

"Even as the substantive concerns of political philosophers have begun to shift as new subject matter enters the philosophical domain, much debate still takes place in the shadow of a set of ideas that reflect the assumptions of a different age. There are benefits to working within an intellectual tradition, but there can also be costs if the tradition struggles to shed light on changing circumstances. After all, radicals in the United States are drawing more inspiration from Marxism than from liberalism."

"The British welfare state was not simply a radical, leftist project but a warfare state, an imperial state, a conservative and patriarchal state where brown and black people were not welcome."

"This also shows that Smith is not as great an imperialist as he is occasionally made out to be. In fact, on close reading, it is impossible to characterise Elphinstone and Smith as imperialist and anti-India historians. This cannot be said about E J Rapson, a Cambridge University Sanskrit professor, the editor of the ancient Indian history volume in the Cambridge History of India series, and the author of brief book, Ancient India, meant for the Indian Civil Service candidates. To Rapson there never was any originality in ancient Indian history, which was also a collection of histories of many separate countries. It is against characters like Rapson that Indian scholars of ancient India wielded their pens."

"Their oldest literature supplies no certain indication that they still retained the recollection of their former home; and we may reasonably conclude therefore that the invasion which brought them into India took place at a date considerably earlier."

"The contact of two races so dissimilar in character, in culture and in institutions as the English and the Indian raises the problem of the contact of cultures in its most acute form. Mutual influence is easiest when two cultures are basically the same; radical difference tends either to mutual repulsion, or to absorption of one by the other. (Spear 1963:126)"

"No support for the entry of ‘Aryan’ populations [in India] is found in physical anthropological data (Petraglia & Allchin 2007)"

"Archreological evidence ... both in Iran and India and Pakistan...indeed it almost always lacks any clear hallmarks to establish its originators as Indo-Europeans."

"The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)"

"From early historical times forward we know that horses have been regularly imported to South Asia. We also know the Indus had a long tradition of trade with centres to the west and north. Would it be surprising therefore if horses were occasionally acquired through trade, ultimately reaching the Indus world by land or sea? This would account for the occurrence of a small number of their bones in various contexts without the need to assume their presence must necessarily be associated with profound cultural change."

"Bridget and Raymond Allchin inform us about the early phase of Mundigak I: "Some characteristic painted designs are similar to those of Kili Ghul Mohammad II [north Baluchistan] and Anj ira I [upper south Baluchistan].""

"Nomadic herdsmen form an important element of rural life in India and Pakistan today, including the old province of Harappan culture. There is every reason to suppose that they did so in Harappan times, and that they played an important part in the economy and organization of the Harappan world."

"Their [the Aryans] presence should therefore be in evidence archaeologically… But as yet it is scarcely attested in the archaeological record presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already indistinguishable from those of the existing population."

"The orientation of port-holes and entrances on the cist graves is frequently towards the south. [...] This demands comparison with later Indian tradition where south is the quarter of Yama. Among the grave goods, iron is almost universal, and the occasional iron spears and tridents (trisulas) suggest an association with the god Siva. The discovery in one grave of a trident with a wrought-iron buffalo fixed to the shaft is likewise suggestive, for the buffalo is also associated with Yama, and the buffalo demon was slain by the goddess Durgà, consort of Siva, with a trident. [...] The picture which we obtain from this evidence, slight as it is, is suggestive of some form of worship of Siva."

"Such "ritual hearths" are reported from the beginning of the Harappan period itself. It has been suggested that they may have been fire altars , evidence of domestic, popular and civic fire-cults of the Indo-Iranians, which are de- scribed in detail in the later Vedic literature. It may then be an indication of culture contact between an early group of Indo-Aryans and the population of the still-flourishing Indus civilization."

"Under the influence of further mental energy, many things, hitherto unaccountable, and included within the realm of the power in the universe, become explicable, and the area of the 'natural' continually expands, a new conception of the power in the universe, based on the yet unknown, being the inevitable result. And, when first the conception of the 'natural' appears, the society is divided against itself; and it is divided against itself once more whenever the area of the 'natural' expands. The new ideas conflict with the old notions; and those who would prefer to preserve their archaic faith struggle against the iconoclasts who desire to destroy it. Such a society is in the rationalistic condition. ...The great mental energy of such a society is directed to every detail of its environment, to every item of human activity, and to every problem of human life. It changes its ideas on every conceivable subject, increases its mental range, and expands in all its multifarious activities. Its method of treating sickness is altered in accordance with its new knowledge; by using the inherent power of reason it formulates and applies its knowledge of the physical universe; it produces more than it consumes, thus creating capital; it unearths new sources of wealth which less energetic societies neglect; it discovers new ways of treating old materials, bends nature to its purpose, and assumes a mastery of the earth. This is productive social energy..."

"...In the contemporary world, it is worrying trying to create cultural groups, because it is always motivated from an interest-position. Trying to define cultures in the past is always, as we know, part of a motivated attempt to find one's nostalgic origins or to create a sense of continuity."

"One of the things I thought was very important during the 1980s was the idea that culture is meaningfully constituted. I still think that is right. But now, I put the emphasis on the "meaningful constitution"rather than the "cultural"bit. I have had arguments with my colleagues in Stanford about this. I take the view that culture is not a helpful term. It tends to be reifying and dangerous. I prefer to break it down and talk about the various processes that constitute it."