Non Fiction Authors From England

"Russia and America are still talking on fairly cordial terms in public, as indeed are Russia and Western Europe, and the dialogue continues on energy and other subjects... The most important element was probably a negative, which is that the U.S. has still not agreed, unlike the rest of the world, to accept Russia into the WTO... the fact of the matter is, given its record at present, the U.S. is in a very weak position when it comes to lecturing Russia on a whole range of subjects, and Putin, on the other hand, is in a pretty strong position, above all, because he does have the support of the overwhelming majority of Russians."

"The existing crisis with Russia has origins that go far beyond Putin. Russia has a foreign and security blob, just as does the United States, with a set of semi-permanent beliefs about Russian vital interests rooted in national history and culture, which are shared by large parts of the population. These include the exclusion of hostile military alliances from Russia’s neighborhood and the protection of the political position and cultural rights of Russian minorities. In the case of Ukraine, NATO membership for that country implied the expulsion of Russia from the naval base of Sevastopol in Crimea (a city of immense importance to Russia, both strategic and emotional), and the creation of a hard international frontier between Russia and the Russian and Russian-speaking minorities in Ukraine, making up more than a third of the Ukrainian population."

"It may also be pointed out that in the Middle East, it is the U.S. that has frequently acted as a disruptor as with the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of the Libyan state, and Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear agreement with Iran, while Russia has often defended the status quo—partly due to a fear of Islamist terrorism that it shares with the U.S."

"This woke thing is awful. Have you ever been woked? You put a hand on somebody's shoulder and you're assaulting them. In the old days if someone was awful to you you'd tell them to eff off and that would be that. Still, I had some horrors in my time."

"There's hard porn, soft porn and Jilly Cooper. Not that Mrs Cooper's latest little nonsense would get any Portnoy award, but I do worry about the influence on young minds of this peculiar combination of romantic fantasy and permissiveness (Barbara Cartland without the iron knickers). Fired by such goings-on as are chronicled in Octavia, heaven knows what the precociously pubescent will get up to."

"[Peter van der Veer writes:] ‘The huge significance of Risley’s work was duly noted by the doyen of Indian anthropology S. Ghurye, who severely criticized Risley’s correlation between race and caste. In Ghurye’s view a long history of racial mingling made this kind of correlation impossible. Ghurye had a fine eye for the politicization of caste that emerged as a consequence of the census operations: “The total result has been, as we have seen, a livening up of caste-spirit”. His focus and main concern was the rise of anti-Brahmin movements both in his state Maharashtra and also in Tamil Nadu. These movements, were fed by ideological division between Aryans and non-Aryans, a division scientifically supported by Risley’s findings’."

"When he [Sir Herbert Risley] became Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, he was determined to carry out within its framework a grand experiment in classifying and ranking castes in the sub-continent as a whole. … Census-taking had often suffered … from the difficulty even of identifying discrete castes and foundered in some census regions over the impossibility of finding any meaningful way of classifying them that did not release a hornets’ nest of contention, as the Commissioner for the 1871 Madras Census put it. Commissioners in their reports often retreated from any greater ambition than providing a list of castes in English alphabetical order. It was clear … uniformity of classification across the country could not be hoped for. Risley’s scheme, therefore, was to send to every Census Commissioner, in each province, presidency, princely state, … a standard scheme, inviting them to set up committees of ‘native gentlemen’ to consider its local applicability and to propose modifications as required."

"[Dr Ambedkar (1891–1956),... after studying the voluminous Nasal Index data of various castes across India that had been published by anthropologists, he came to a striking conclusion using Risely's own data to disprove his thesis: ] The measurements establish that the Brahmin and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans, the Untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians the Untouchables are also Dravidians. If the Brahmins are Nagas, the Untouchables are also Nagas. Such being the facts, the theory . . . must be said to be based on a false foundation. 33"

"[Clare Anderson provides one such instance:] ‘Risley’s ideas met with some opposition at the time, even from those sympathetic to anthropometric methodology. Crooke wrote that when anthropometry was applied to caste, there were only very slight differences between the high and low castes. This did not show that anthropometry was flawed, but that ‘the present races of India are practically one people’. According to Crooke, Risley’s Nasal Index table showed no appreciable differences between Brahmins and the so-called lower castes. Indeed, according to Risley’s own figures, the latter were more nasally refined than Rajputs in the northwest Provinces. Of course, Crooke linked caste to occupational differentiation rather than distinct racial origins. There have been hints that Crooke’s career suffered as a result of his dispute with Risley’."

"Ex Occidente Imperium ; the genius of Empire in India has come to her from the West ; and can be maintained only by constant infusions of fresh blood from the same source."

"This sole possible description of the Dasa nose, however, like Pinocchio's nasal organ, was to have an expanded life of its own. By 1891, H. H. Risley, who was compiling his ethnological material on Indian tribes and castes, was able to say that "no one can have glanced at the Vedic accounts of the Aryan advance without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India [whom] they spoke of as 'the noseless ones'". The solitary nasal reference had suddenly become a frequent one."

"No one can have glanced at the literature of the subject and in particular at the Vedic accounts of Aryan advance, without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. So impressed were the Aryans with the shortcomings of their enemies’ noses that they often spoke of them as “the noseless ones” and their keen perception of the importance of this feature seems almost to anticipate the opinion of Dr Collingnon, that the nasal index ranks higher as a distinctive character than stature or even the cephalic index itself. In taking their nose, then, as the starting point of our present analysis we may claim to be following at once the most ancient and the most modern authorities on the subject of racial physiognomy’."

"The racial theory of Indian civilization alludes to racial attitudes of whites towards blacks, found in the segregated southern United States after the Civil War and in South Africa, as a constant of history, or rather as a transcendent fact immune to historical changes that is as operative in the Vedic period as it is now."

"Other foes made their intentions clear by denunciations of one’s family or religion, and by ravaging the countryside and plundering the towns. The British, generally so restrained in their language and so disciplined in the field, were very different. They could make hostility look like friendship and conquest like a favor. It was difficult to rally support against such tactics."

"What I have tried to show, by looking in depth at one modern theory of human nature, is that our modern intellectual culture, for all its secularism and its rationalism, remains largely theological or crypto-theological in its nature. This is why psychoanalysis, with its subtle reworking of Judaeo- Christian orthodoxies and its almost completely invisible reliance on the creationist theory of human nature, has proved so deeply appealing."

"It's a thing that happens to living creatures when they're in trouble, an inward journey. That's what the shutting down of everything is about. Regarding depression as an enemy is the worst possible thing you can do. It drains it of meaning. It makes it something exterior to yourself."

"The light is extraordinary – luminous, dusty, giving every pale surface the lustre of mother-of-pearl. Mounds of cow parsley and scythed grass glow in the moonbeams like suspended balls of mist."

"Finding words to bridge that divide between the otherness of nature – a swift sleeping on the wing 5,000ft up, and the life-choosing immediacy, the intimate familiarity of the rush of wings past the face – is what most nature writers are striving to do, not wallow in some vanished pastoral world."

"I wonder if, in the future, we will regard this insistent urge to use wild beings as “proxies” as a kind of cultural appropriation, and begin to see the living world as a commonwealth, not a colony."

"The Holy Spirit or the Shechinah, as we have already observed, is symbolized by the letter ש Shin. When, therefore, a man has invoked the Spiritual Self, his Holy Guardian Angel, and attained to His Knowledge and Conversation, the process is described as the descent of the letter ש Shin into the midst of the elemental name of יהוה Tetragrammaton, thus forming a new word יהשוה Yeheshua, the Pentagrammaton, the symbol of a new being, the Adept or Tsaddik in whom the birth of Spirit has equilibrized the base and unredeemed elements of matter."

"The letters יהוה YHVH of the Tetragrammaton are used to imply the whole gamut of the four elements. י Y as the creative function of the Archetypal Realm, is Fire the Chiah; the first ה H represents the Cup, the symbol of the passive character of the Creative World, and is Water the Neschamah; ו V is the Son, the active vice-regent of the Father, and is Air the Ruach; and the final H ה is the Nephesch; the passive receptive Earth, fructifying all things."

"[On Liz Truss] I mean, my issue with her was that, having been bold on the entry, … for me, it was a total capitulation at the end. And, I think, I felt let down, frankly."

"Superficially, he is a black man. He went to Eton, I think; he went to a very expensive prep school, all the way through, the top schools in the country. If you hear him on the Today programme, you wouldn't know he is black."

"I think the prime minister was very much of the view that we needed to move things fast. But I think it was too quick. If you look at it, it was on the 23rd of September. We only got into the office on the 6th of September. And looking back I think a measured pace would have been much better."

"After the mini-budget we were going at breakneck speed and I said, you know, we should slow down, slow down. She said, "Well, I’ve only got two years" and I said, "You will have two months if you carry on like this". And that is, I’m afraid, what happened."

"[On Truss sacking him.] People will ask, "If you sacked the person who was doing what you wanted, why are you still there?""

"The prime minister was ... very dynamic, very forceful. That’s a great strength."

"There is more to come – we have only been here for 19 days [...] I want to see, over the next year, people retain more of their money."

"Absolutely, 100%, I'm not going anywhere."

"These people, political people, but I think particularly people who get to the top, they’re kind of adrenaline junkies. They enjoy the challenge. It's like watching or being involved in a kind of action movie yourself. Not to trivialize it, but, you know, you're right at the center of events, you've got a lot of authority. You get to decide things. For some people, that's extremely, not only challenging, but incredibly rewarding. And then for that all to stop is, I can see why they want to get back."

"You just get these empty, this feeling of kind of emptiness. You've got to remember that for a lot of people who are right at the top, they’ve been thinking about this for decades. They've been thinking about, you know, becoming an MP, getting into government, maybe getting into Cabinet, you know, all of that. They've been on this road, on this journey. And then once you're out, it's over. And so there's a kind of feeling of emptiness. I've seen it and you can see it on their faces sometimes. They're just completely bewildered."

"[Asked if his observations matched his own experiences] Well, no, I … held high office. I really enjoyed that. It's a great feeling. It's a great honor. It's incredibly interesting. Very nerve racking as well. But I think, I've always tried to be a bit more balanced."

"In Robert Walpole's life he has found the exemplar of that need for political stability without which social stability is impossible; yet, as the concluding remarks upon political stability of his Ford Lectures show, he is intensely aware that this very banishment of the chaos which haunts us all, holds in itself the nemesis of an inertia upon which social instability feeds. To have maintained such profound and pressing human problems as the constant background of works of exceptional detailed scholarship has surely been Professor Plumb's own splendid answer to the urgent demand he posed in his penetrating lecture "The Death of the Past" of 1969, when he called for a renewal o a meaningful study of history in an age when the past no longer gives the old simple linear answers that helped to hold civilisation together from the age of Eusebius to the century of Karl Marx."

"If boldly conceived, thoughtfully researched and elegantly written popular history is once again enjoying an extraordinary flowering in Britain, it was Sir John Plumb who planted the seeds, and tended the garden, while himself producing some of its most dazzling blooms. From the beginning of his career to its end he never wavered from the view that history's vocation might begin in the academy, but it should not end there; that as an illumination of the human condition, the "interpreter of its destiny", it was too important to be confined to the intra-mural disputes of the professionals."

"In 1950 Plumb was confident enough to write for "The Pelican History of England" his justly famous masterpiece of compression, England in the Eighteenth Century, with its shrewd thumbnail sketches of the powerful and its unforgettable social scene-painting. On its pages countless readers smelled the London streets as well as the nose on a Houghton Bordeaux. It was, in miniature, writing of the kind Plumb admired in his literary epigones such as Sterne and Rabelais."

"Creative energy is one of Professor Plumb's most obvious gifts – another is his sense of reality. No other historian can convey so vividly the feeling for how men breathe, eat, breed, enjoy themselves, go about their business, hope, worry and die. He is not too fastidious, he has a brotherly sympathy for the lusts of the flesh and the pride of the eye. All his books are written in what the French used to call the odour of the man... Vigorous, empathetic, sane, Professor Plumb is one of the tonic spirits of our day."

"I once wrote that I knew no one else who could at the same time master the technical problems of conveying the sweep of history – the tour d'horizon of international relations, balance of power, economic development, social structure, cultural achievement and national ambition – and at the same time study these landscapes of the past with perceptive and original interpretations of the major figures bestriding the stage he had set. Plumb switches from the telescope to the microscope with unusual ease."

"Some years ago, Sir John Plumb, aware of the threat both to the general mind and to the survival of his profession that the undermining of ancient convictions could pose, in effect advised historians to write the sort of history that helps people towards a contented and more cheerful life. But surely that is to back corruption: we are not to tell what for good reason we believe to be much nearer the truth if it upsets people. Besides, it cannot be done. All history upsets some people: what Plumb really called for was the sort of history that supported the social attitudes, ambitions and behaviour that he preferred."

"He has always written to be read. He is always as concerned with the quality of his prose as he is with the quality of his argument or the precision of his evidence. In intention alone, such literary concern marks him out from the mass of practising academic historians, and the results of his endeavours mark him out even more clearly. His writing is, for pace, vigour and flow, unrivalled among contemporary historians and sometimes it is held to be too vivid. His figures of speech are not always appreciated by the profession: when he wrote, for instance, of Walpole's attempt to muzzle the youthful Chatham, "As well might he attempt to stop a hurricane with a hairnet", there were not a few reviewers who tut-tutted at the extravagance of the idea and its expression, but fortunately most have welcomed a writer who can present the product of massive scholarship elegantly and compactly and vividly. For his work can convey an unusual sense of intellectual excitement, and its polish and panache make him one of the most readable historians... He is a man to read for the larger scale and the developing vision. He is an historian to read for the changing relationship between political allies and rivals, for the battle between moral scruple and tactical skill in political factions, for the narrative curve of a politician's career, of the unfolding of a man's character in the face of opportunity, triumph, setback or defeat."

"Professor Plumb is outstanding among contemporary historians in fighting this diminished scope of his chosen discipline. It is shown, of course, in the breadth of his historical interests where his editorial work and his essays demonstrate his remarkable historical range. But it emerges more powerfully in the depth of his probing, and the constantly held wide perspective in which he has studied and made his own a portion of English history – the interrelation of political and social order in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries... Again and again J. H. Plumb brings to our conciousness by inference the triumphant victory of humanity in the last centuries, despite all setbacks, over material squalor, disease and brutality of manners; equally insistent is his sense of the tragic shortness of men's lives set beside their aspirations, of their persistent proneness to cruelty, to lethargy or to corruption."

"Men write history for many reasons; to try to understand the forces which impel mankind along its strange course; to justify a religion, a nation, or a class; to make money; to fulfil ambition; to assuage obsession; and a few, the true creators, to ease the ache within."

"His [Winston Churchill's] violent disagreement with Neville Chamberlain did not spring solely from thwarted ambition or personal dislike. Such motives may have sharpened the phrases and honed his epigrams, but the long policy of appeasement, the weakening of Britain's world role, the acceptance of oppression and racialism were to Churchill a denial of England's historical destiny and, because a denial, bound to end in disaster."

"For many years, as a gloomy exercise, I used to look for British cars on the streets of New York and the best that I could hope for was a rare "mini" or a rarer Rolls-Royce. Now its streets are alive with Jaguars – a tribute to the new professionalism in British industry which goes right down to the shop floor, a professionalism, however, which still has to be extended and encouraged. This can only be done by continuing the policies upon which Mrs Thatcher's government has embarked – particularly in education where the need to instill professional qualities and to teach technological skills is paramount. It is only through well trained youth and expanding industry that new, real jobs can be created. Everyone to whom I spoke in America – senators, industrialists, bankers, publishers – from the left of the Democratic party to the right of the Republican spoke with admiration of Mrs Thatcher, not only of the part she is playing in nuclear disarmament but also of the way she has changed the image of Britain from one of collapse and decay to self-reliance and hope. They believe, and I agree, that a victory for Labour would be disastrous. Mr Kinnock and his colleagues possess neither the intellect, the foresight, the sense of human reality nor the creative imagination needed for leadership. They know they cannot convince so they attempt to bamboozle."

"The Spanish Civil War was, in a sense, the war before the lights went out—the war that could have changed the course of European and world history if power actors had behaved in different ways."

": "I think Helen Graham is probably the most profound historian writing about the Spanish Civil War in the English language.""

"...War in Spain remains ‘unfinished business’, and not only inside Spain itself, but across Europe, and in Britain too."

"As you write, it doesn’t matter what age you are. I think I’m a better historian now, at 75, than I was at 25."

"Fermentation is domesticated decomposition—rot rehoused."

"Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake changed the way I look at fungi."

"The success of this approach depends on the ecological fit. Poorly matched mycorrhizal species might do more harm to plants than good. Worse, introducing opportunistic fungal species to new environments might displace local fungal strains with unknown ecological consequences. It is a fact not always taken into account by the fast-growing industry of commercial mycorrhizal products, often marketed as one-size-fits-all quick fixes. As in the ballooning market for human probiotics, many of the microbial strains sold are selected not because they are particularly suitable but because they are easy to produce in manufacturing facilities."