University Of Cambridge Alumni

"Failing at least initial moves towards such a compromise, it does indeed look likely that there will be some form of new Russian attack on Ukraine, though by no means necessarily a large-scale invasion. In the event of war, however far the Russian army marches will be followed by a new Russian proposal for a deal in return for Russian withdrawal. The only difference between then and now will be that NATO will have been humiliated by its inability to fight, the West and Ukraine will be in a much weaker position to negotiate a favorable deal—and that in the meantime, thousands of people will have died."

"My Russian interlocutors, some of whom I’ve known for many years, are by no means pro-Western anymore; they’re very angry with Western policy in recent years and they’re not pro-Ukrainian. But I have to say they’re horrified by what has happened. They really didn’t expect an invasion on this scale. They thought something would happen, but that it would be much more limited."

"Russian propaganda says that the Maidan Revolution was simply a coup and orchestrated by America. Well, no, because many ordinary Ukrainians, especially younger Ukrainians, including Russian-speaking Ukrainians, desperately wanted to get away from this horribly corrupt, economically stagnant post-Soviet reality and join the West"

"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."

"Russia perceives NATO as an enemy — fair enough: NATO perceives Russia as an enemy — and is determined to prevent major countries on Russia’s borders from becoming members of NATO. Russia, in this way, I have to say, is no different from the United States. Your previous segment was about the history of U.S. coups in Honduras and other parts of Latin America to ensure that this area remains in American sphere of influence, or at the very least that external powers are excluded from that region. It’s called the Monroe Doctrine, right? Russia is no different in that regard. It doesn’t mean that Putin hopes for a new Soviet Union, but he does certainly want to keep NATO out of that region and is prepared to fight, as he’s shown in the past, to stop that happening. The problem about NATO is that it talks the talk, but, I mean, no serious person thinks that European countries, with the possible exception of Poland, will go to war for Ukraine. So, this, as well as the gas dependence, which you mentioned, is, in the end, a major card in Russia’s hand, that — in the very last resort. I’m not saying that the Putin government wants war, but it is prepared to go to war in the very last resort, and NATO almost certainly is not... Zelensky is extremely unpopular now for the failure to improve the economic situation — worsened by COVID, of course — and continued very high levels of corruption."

"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."

"Russia will do their utmost not to target civilians in Ukraine or Ukrainian cities, because their whole political plan depends on keeping enough of the population on their side. But if enough of the Ukrainian troops retreat into the cities to fight it out, then the cities will be badly damaged and lots of civilians will be killed. That will obviously tarnish Russia still further in the eyes of Western and international opinion, but it will also make it even more difficult politically for Russia’s plans within Ukraine."

"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."

"A central distinction in realist international relations thought is that between vital and secondary national interests. Vital interests are threats to a state’s survival, and can take the form either of conquest and subjugation from outside... Rivalry between the United States and China is not a battle to the death of this kind, and it is very important that the United States not see it as such."

"The phrase “a new cold war” is a cheap journalistic formula, but it contains real dangers. The United States’ geopolitical competition with China is fundamentally different from that with the Soviet Union, and if the U.S. establishment frames it in the terms of the Cold War, it may do great damage to the United States and the world in general. ... Beijing’s ambitions shouldn’t be treated as an existential threat to the United States."

"... I doubt whether there is one book of his by which, in the field of his teaching, he is likely to be permanently significant. But if ever I have met wisdom incarnate, Lowes Dickinson was its embodiment. There is not one book of his that does not suggest vistas; nor one that does not make the claim of reason seem more worthy of reverence. He wrote nothing that did not possess beauty of form, delicacy of insight, the call of a supremely generous nature to the life upon the heights."

"... Dickinson published a wide range of books, plays and dialogues throughout his career, including Revolution and Reaction in Modern France (1892), Letters from a Chinese Official (1901), Goethe and Faust (1928), and Plato and His Dialogues (1932). As the breadth of these texts suggests, Dickinson's career stands as testament to an intellectual life led before the concretion of academic specialization. He has been variously described as a classicist, a historian, and a political scientist, and his work on international relations was deeply influenced by an overall critical humanist perspective on intellectual inquiry that embraced a variety of historical, philosophical, literary and political perspectives."

"The real antithesis is not between East and West, but between India and the rest of the world." Only India is different; only India un spools some other possibility fantastically. India is the odd man out of the global citizenry... Thus India stands for something, which distinguishes it from all other peoples...Standing on the Ghats at Benares or by any village well we are transported into the beautiful antique world."

"The scientific denial of immortality is based upon the admitted fact of the connection between mind and brain; whence it is assumed that the death of the brain must involve the death of that, whatever it be, which has been called the soul. This may indeed be true; but it is not necessarily or obviously true; it does not follow logically from the fact of the connection."

"What we commonly have in our mind when we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more or less metaphysical character, formulated in a creed and supported by an organization distinct from the state. And the first thing we have to learn about the is that it included nothing of the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no articles. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials, appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeks may have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was something very different from all that we are in the habit of associating with the world."

"In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it is intimate, humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in the nursery."

"Some of my readers may have heard of a club known as the Seekers. It is now extinct; but in its day it was famous, and included a number of men prominent in politics or in the professions. We used to meet once a fortnight, on the Saturday night, in London during the winter, but in the summer usually at the country house of one or other of the members, where we would spend the week end together."

"History may be used to support any conclusion, according to the emphasis of our conscious or unconscious principle of selection."

"You know, I think Nigel Farage is already the leader of the Conservatives. He certainly makes a better, more convincing Tory than Rishi Sunak."

"Yesterday morning, I was on a train to Liverpool to cover the trial when my editor called to break the news about the new guilty plea. My first reaction was anger. The reason I had set aside a predicted three-to-four weeks away from home, putting myself through what would undoubtedly be harrowing stories of maimed and dying primary-school children, was pretty straightforward: I wanted to bear witness. I wanted to get to the truth about what should, by rights, if this still calls itself a civilised society, be regarded as a notorious massacre. The heinous mass-murder of children with a carved knife – our nation has known nothing on that scale since Dunblane – in a respectable seaside town on the west coast of Lancashire merited a full public explanation."

"Members of the Garrick Club, I beg you: do not surrender to the unsmiling commissars of the Cultural Revolution. They seek the elimination of you and your kind. Keep serving your awful offal. Beware, salad! Keep the ladies out and the Archibalds in."

"At Cop28, there are many who are convinced that we face a climate catastrophe in the next few decades if net zero is not delivered. Well, I say we are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist in trying to reach that goal by 2050. Humanity cannot bear it."

"One thing that both sides avoid mentioning is the fact that [[Russell Brand|[Russell] Brand]] was a hugely successful womaniser and his success was enabled by the girls who threw themselves at him in huge numbers."

"Are the females who fell for his weapons-grade flirting and lascivious quips, for that vampish slash of Kohl under the beady, greedy eyes, all victims of "emotional abuse"? Or did they possibly make really bad choices, as most of us have done at some point, ignoring the fact that the Shagger of the Year was unlikely to turn into Mr Darcy just because he pretended to take your phone number after you'd had sex with him in the hotel opposite his gig?"

"This is known as "victim shaming" now, but it is a true account of how young women felt about a famous, magnetic male who flattered them. And it would be more honest, perhaps, to admit that certain girls will always throw themselves at powerful, sexy, exploitative men."

"I met Jeremy once on holiday and liked him enormously. Whatever he is full of, it's certainly not hate. (What Prince Harry and Meghan are full of is another matter.) Rather, he exudes a buoyant goodwill and a refusal to take things seriously that cheers everyone up. It has deservedly made him one of the most popular TV figures of our pious, finger-wagging age. You know, I would far rather have a world full of Jeremy Clarksons than Meghan Markles. I'm sure that things feel pretty serious for him right now, with the woke witchfinders at the door, but let's hope good times and high spirits return soon. We need him more than ever. Most people know that, for God’s sake."

"Just six months after she won her vote, [[Theresa May|[Theresa] May]] was forced out of office because people had cottoned onto the fact she was offering Brino (Brexit in name only). Johnson is a much better dissembler than May but, with slowly dawning horror, Tory voters have realised that the man who was once their hero is Cino – Conservative in name only. No wonder people are upset. We thought we were voting for Winston Churchill and we got the shifty offspring of Edward Heath and Greta Thunberg."

"For any Briton unburdened by snobbery, having a prime minister who was once a conjurer’s assistant would be pretty cool, actually. Besides, what better preparation for a Conservative leadership contest than having to maintain a fixed grin while a chap saws you in half?"

""But Labour will be worse" no longer works as a bogeyman to scare the Tory tribe back into the polling booth. One wag described the choice between [[Rishi Sunak|[Rishi] Sunak]] and Sir Keir Starmer as, "Which Kray twin do you prefer?" Although one can't help feeling a little wistfully that, unlike Rishi and Keir, Reggie and Ronnie would at least have got a few things sorted in their forthright East End fashion."

"If she doesn't take real, decisive action almost immediately, [[Liz Truss|[Liz] Truss]]'s honeymoon period could rival the reign of Lady Jane Grey for brevity."

"What about the multiple charges against Boris – dreadful reputation, cavalier with detail – that were made during the questions at the end by BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, speaking with clear distaste on behalf of the Chattering Classes? Just in time, the playful Boris millions know and love emerged from solemn statesmen mode to gently rib the sanctimonious Ms Kuenssberg. Out of “that great minestrone of observations", he told her encouragingly, he had picked up "one crouton, that I have been inconsistent". It was funny, yet, at the same time, it could not have been more serious. Boris was signalling that he won't modify either his language, or his behaviour, to please a politically correct, censorious liberal minority. He will express, in language most people understand, the ideas they hold dear. The metropolitan elite will damn him as a "populist", which is another word for a persuader and a winner. We like winners."

"Hope. Conservatives haven’t had hope for a very long time. Honestly, they would be mad not to choose Boris. No one else comes close. Can he start tomorrow, please?"

"We are already in Opposition, dear reader. Sorry to say. We are in Opposition against our own government, and have been for some time. It is sad and exhausting and dreadfully demoralising that it should have come to this, but here we are."

"What a great victory this is for Boris Johnson. Who else could have fought the people's corner so magnificently? Tied down like Gulliver in Lilliput with a hundred Parliamentary amendments; every which way he moved the buggers blocked him."

"[T]hat moment when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom entered another party conference to Abba, dancing like a stork struck by lightning ... And still they didn't demand her resignation."

"Millions of people thought that when they put their cross in the Leave box, they were going to get Boris, whom they love. Michael Gove and his team had a better idea. They shafted Boris by pulling their support from his campaign with about 11 minutes to go. In strategic terms, this was like murdering a puppy on Christmas Day. Boris's surprise withdrawal may have looked like an admission of defeat, but it was actually a brilliant tactical move which left Gove standing next to the puppy corpse holding a carving knife. Boris declaring his support for the fantastic Andrea Leadsom, Gove's main Leave rival, pretty much guaranteed that if Boris wasn't going to get the top job, neither was Judas."

"At first glance, the diverse candidates and supporters of the Brexit Party have little in common. What unites us, I suspect, is a sense that arrogant and unaccountable politicians in the capital have stopped making life better for the average family. Have stopped even caring. Through a combination of ineptitude and shortsightedness, and a maintenance of high immigration levels for the benefit of business, not local communities, politicians have murdered hope."

"This is the beginning of the end for the Remainers, but it's the start of something that could be extraordinary for Britain. Our Prime Minister already enjoys considerable affection, but he will be loved if he can pull off the trick of harnessing a post-Brexit economic boom to the vital cause of world-class public services."

"One thing you can be sure this embarrassingly useless inquiry will not be concluding is that our pandemic policy was devised and implemented by a group of spectrummy males, many of them physicists, mathematical modellers and behavioural psychologists who would struggle to pick out their own child in a school photograph."

"As regards the qualities of the Persians we are in the main dependent on Greek sources. Clearly they were not a people that we should call intellectual. They do not themselves seem to have had an inclination towards literature, medicine, or philosophical and scientific speculation. They were probably most at ease when living as country gentlemen. Despite the uncompromising black and white of their religious creed as expressed by Darius, there is no trace of fanaticism in them, and in general they would seem to have been tolerant. They liked to live in pleasant surroundings; coming from a country in which cultivation is restricted to fertile patches of watered land they may have been rather narrowly ‘oasis-minded’. Luxury appealed to them."

"The situation of the Muslims of China was very different. They were geographically remote from the Muslim heartlands— in contrast to the Muslims of India, whose contacts were so close that to a large extent they transacted their affairs in Persian... The result was the appearance of a Muslim literature in Chinese that pressed the argument that Confucian and Muslim values were fully compatible, if not identical. Thus an inscription purportedly dating from 742, but likely to have been forged by Chinese Muslims in the Ming period, says of Confucius and Muḥammad that “their language differed, yet their principles agreed.”... Nor is Islamic-­Confucian syncretism likely to have cut much ice with the Chinese elite. One prominent Chinese Muslim author was able to persuade some Confucian scholars to write laudatory prefaces for his books, and the title of his heavily Confucianized work on Muslim ritual found a place in an imperial compendium of 1773–­1782. But the work was placed in the company of books that “contained little that was praiseworthy and much that was contemptible,” and an editorial comment, while conceding that the author’s literary style “is actually rather elegant,” maintained that “the clever literary ornamentation does him no good” for the simple reason that “Islam is fundamentally far-­fetched and absurd.”"

"With regard to the formal structure of the tradition, we need not beat about the bush. In obvious ways the Islamic heritage lends itself so easily to fundamentalization that it could almost be said to invite it."

"But the one remarkable achievement was the mixing of races that set the example for the cosmopolitan civilization of the near East after the conquest by Alexander. What resulted from the ‘Pax Persica’ was syncretism and cultural assimilation on a scale that had not previously been thinkable."

"One is that, even before the rise of Islamism, there were indications that leftism did not in general fare as well in the Islamic world as it did in other Third World regions. There was a sense at the time that the presence of Islam displaced the political spectrum to the right. One effect of this was a certain opportunistic reticence on the part of leftists in the Islamic world when it came to the manifestation of antireligious sentiments."

"[The milieu of the Persian court was one in which intellectual and artistic intercourse between representatives of the various satrapies flourished. The Persians themselves] “clearly … were not a people that we should call intellectual. They do not themselves seem to have had an inclination towards literature, medicine, or philosophical and scientific speculation.” Still, they provided a setting in which such speculation could be freely pursued... “what resulted from the ‘Pax Persica,’” says Cook, “was syncretism and cultural assimilation on a scale that had not previously been thinkable.”"

"From the Greek writers we get some idea of Persian education; but it applies only to the nobility, and there was no place for what we should call intellectual pursuits. From what we can gather, the sons of Persians of note were weaned from the ‘harem at the age of five (when for the first time they were allowed in the presence of the father) and until they were twenty or more they were brought up at the royal court (or in the provinces at the satraps’ court) Emphasis was laid on speaking the truth and learning the examples that the legends provided; older children might listen to the judgements of the royal justices. Herodotus says that among the Persians the thing most prized after valour in battle was to be the father of many children, we can understand that he aim was to contribute the maximum to Persian military strength, and the result must have been a population explosion at the higher social level."

"There are several reasons why Muslims make good enemies in the Indian context. One is that Muslims, whether they like it or not, are historically identified with the invaders who did most to destroy Hindu culture. Of course, not all the Muslim elite in India espoused this program assiduously, and many did not pursue it at all or indeed did the opposite. But there was enough rhetoric of destruction, and enough actual destruction, to lend support to a deep sense of Hindu grievance."

"In an epoch-making study entitled English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime, published in 1985, he forcefully argued that eighteenth-century England, its policy based on a close alliance between the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church, was an "ancien regime", indistinguishable from contemporary France, for instance, or even Spain. What it was not was some sort of forward-looking experiment in constitutional monarchy and representative government. Thus the final collapse of this ancien regime was heralded not by the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 but by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1830 [sic], when England ceased to be a confessional state. In the same way he argued for the close identification of political radicalism with religious nonconformity, in contradiction to E. P. Thompson's Tawneyesque The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 and well established as a classic. Clark's theories have provoked a great deal of opposition, not eased by his confrontational technique and acerbity of manner, but he has to be taken seriously, and it must be rare indeed for a scholar of his age (born in 1951) to have two major historical conferences and two issues of different professional journals entirely devoted to a discussion of his theories. We must never forget that his work runs in parallel with the excellent but more conventional work of John Cannon, Ian Christie, Paul Langford and others, but there is no doubt that he has put a new spin on British eighteenth-century studies, and it is safe to say that they will never be the same again."

"The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth I) over many centuries. The cult of the English common law was already ancient, and was revitalised by texts like Matthew Hale's The History of the Common Law of England (1713) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). But the biggest body of literature outlining a shared experience concerned the English church. It was here especially that an image of a free, Protestant people was worked out and sustained, whether in best-sellers like John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1559 and many later editions) or in heavyweight theological texts like Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593; first complete edition, 1662). Between them, these texts kept alive the interpretation long ago placed on English history by the Venerable Bede (d.735) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum that its unifying theme was providential destiny and survival in the face of overwhelming odds."

"Jonathan Clark is the most controversial historian of his generation. In his English Society, 1688–1832, he reopened debate about Hanoverian England, by asserting the centrality of religious belief and ideology. Clark's Revolution and Rebellion sought to link political developments and historical controversies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and, in doing so, took issue with most British scholars of the period."