Editors From England

"Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination."

"... During the Renaissance Luther and Calvin played their great rôles, and it saw Loyola and the little understood . At the beginning, Columbus and Da Gama make their voyages, and its later years were made romantic by the hazardous adventures of and Drake. It was the age of the , an age of adventure, an age of criticism, an age of laughter, an age of reaction and rejection, of destruction and reconstruction, of glory for princes and of suffering for the common people."

"... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the men and women I have met in the flesh. Dickens is the novelist of the lettered and of the unlettered. The man at the street corner who has hardly heard of Thackeray knows all about and ."

"... in condemning it should be remembered that the statesmanship of intrigue of which she was a mistress has survived from her time to ours, and was not destroyed even by the . She was the pupil of Machiavelli, and she put the theories of the Italian political philosopher into more successful practice than any other sovereign or statesman in history."

"In 1859 founded the ', and Thackeray became its first editor. Among his contributors were Tennyson, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, , , Ruskin, Trollope, , Adelaide Procter, Matthew Arnold, and Lord Lytton."

"In the early years of the eleventh century the . , the father of , deposed three popes, no man saying him nay. The removal of the right of election from the Roman nobility to the , however, brought to an end an system under which it was the Emperor who really decided who should sit on the papal throne, and was determined that lesser ecclesiastical appointments should also be taken out his hand. In the complicated feudal system, bishops and abbots often held their lands as the vassals of a suzerain lord, compounding for the military service demanded from lay vassals. It was the habit, too, of the pious to endow monasteries and churches on the condition that they held the patronage. And, in one way and another, the noble, the prince, and the emperor claimed the right of ecclesiastical investiture which in effect meant the right of nomination to the offices of the Church. This lay patronage naturally led to simony, and it was the fashion for rich abbeys and attractive bishoprics to be sold to the highest bidder, to the scandal of the faithful and the hindrance of the work of the Church."

"... Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs essentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the people. And this is the fact that gives him his peculiar importance in the modern world."

"Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remembered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities."

"It is improbable that Wycliff had much to do personally with the preparation of the , the first version four years afterward. This was the first complete translation of the into English, but it must not be supposed that before Wycliff's time the Scriptures had been altogether out of reach of the simple man with no understanding of Latin. It should be remembered that, in the Middle Ages, every one who could read, could read Latin. Before the era of the printing press translations were not as necessary as they are today."

"Whenever a , or, for that matter, any indoor diversion, becomes too serious and scientific for the average mind it soon ceases to be fashionable. Whenever the professional cuts in, the man-of-the-word cuts off—to seek some new diversion which does not require its votaries to study a shelf-full of text-books."

"... On several occasions I have seen a cuckoo mobbed by small birds, and it would be pleasant to think it was done as a protest on the part of decent bird-society against a disgusting anti-social parasite. But the probability is that they mistake the cuckoo for a hawk."

"There is no greater literary sin than the omission of an Index, and, if I had my way, even novels would be provided with charts of this kind to their multifarious contents—how convenient it wold be for readers, as well as reviewers, to have such a handy means of checking the emotions of 's quick-change heroines and the involved relationships, business and otherwise, or Mr. Galsworthy's , who increase in number and variety with each successive installment of his epic of property!"

"Athens became the capital of , the clearing-house of religions and moral ideas, whatever their source."

"In an age when the worst of sinners implicitly accepted the teaching of the , what we now regard as "honest doubt" was universally looked on as a sort of leprosy of the soul, a monstrous and highly infectious plague. The heretic was a germ-carrier to be ruthlessly routed out; the more virtuous his life, the more conspicuous his zeal for truth-seeking, the greater the danger of his example to the community. So the philosopher, who was not a theological first and last was apt to fall into bad odor with the conservative churchmen such as , who distrusted the study of logic and protested against any attempt to understand the mysteries of the Faith. , however, who was afterwards , thought that heresy must be fought by its own weapons, and he sought with much success the "necessary reasons" underlying the tenets of the Church concerning the nature of and His relations with his creatures."

"... the discoveries, rich and romantic and utterly unexpected as they were, have given the North-West a world-wide advertisement of inestimable value. And this is an age of advertisement. Public opinion about such discoveries always passes through two stages—a period of universal credulity, followed by a period of universal incredulity."

"... Married people are in a position to make the closest study of one another's predilections, yet it is well known that many a marriage has been marred, or even unmade, by incompatibility of s."

"The spirit of the work of Hippocrates and his disciples, perhaps the noblest manifestation of the Greek concept of man's duty to man, is expressed in the "" ... If Hippocrates had done nothing more in his laborious life-time than formulate this ideal of the good physician's duty to suffering humanity, he would yet be among our greatest benefactors."

"... Where fresh water and salt water mingle, two s are busy feeding. They run to and fro, taking little steps with their wings ups, bobbing quaintly and ing low. If , who's bright and innocent beauty has something bird-like in it, wants a Gull's Dance, she should come to these shining sands to learn it. There goes a on the point all the way, light and elusive—what a mistress of technique! The choregraphy of sea-beaches is as yet unexplored; it is quite beyond the sultry, land-locked imagination of ."

"When hackney carriages were first introduced into London — these were the first carriages that you could hail in the streets — so, basically taxis — this led to a massive backlash from .. the incumbent providers of rides in London— who were the . And that was how you used to get around London. You would hail a boat by the river and say “I want to go to ” or “I want to go up to ”. And so they all complained and they said their profits were running away on wheels, because these hackney carriages had showed up."

"This is Tom Standage's third pocket-sized book delving into the history of science and engineering, and yet again he has found a subject that is not only fascinating, but which also resonates with contemporary issues. In ', Standage explored the development of the telegraph, which permitted long-distance instantaneous communication for the first time. … In The Neptune File , Standage explained how in the 19th century a new unseen planet was discovered because of its gravitational tugging, which caused Uranus to deviate from its predicted path. … Now we have The Mechanical Turk, the story of the 18th-century automaton that convinced everyone that a machine could play world-class chess, a feat that was only truly achieved in the last decade. Standage reveals how our ancestors reacted to this first apparent example of artificial intelligence. He explains how the machine actually worked, and he brings us up to date with the terrible moment when a computer beat , the world chess champion."

"As the tides of history have ebbed and flowed, different drinks have come to prominence in different times, places, and cultures, from villages to ancient Greek dining rooms or s. Each one became popular when it met a particular need or aligned with a historical trend; in some cases, it then went on to influence the course of history in unexpected ways. Just as archaeologists divide history into different periods based on the use of different materials—the stone age, the , the , and so on—it is also possible to divide world history into periods dominated by different drinks. Six beverages in particular—beer, wine, , coffee, tea, and —chart the flow of world history. Three contain , and three contain , but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day."

"... Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a catalyst of social transformation, societal organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. From prehistory to the present, the stories of these transformations form a narrative that encompasses the whole of human history. Food's first transformative role was as a foundation for entire civilizations. The adoption of agriculture made possible new settled lifestyles and set mankind on the path to the modern world. But the staple crops that supported the first civilizations— and in the Near East, and in Asia, and maize and potatoes in the Americas—were not simply discovered by chance. Instead, they emerged through a complex process of , as desirable traits were selected and propagated by early farmers. These staple crops are, in effect, inventions: deliberately cultivated technologies that only exist as a result of human intervention."

"We've been caught out in the past by unexpected exhaust products from transport infrastructure. First it was horse manure, then it was CO². This time it's data. We must not make the same mistake again!"

"During Queen Victoria's reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its uses with a deluge of information. ... The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the ."

"Dickens took great interest in theatrical affairs, and was very fond of theatrical society. He had a lifelong affection for , and a great regard for and ; of the latter he said once to me, "He has the brain of a man, combined with that strange power of arriving, without knowing how or why, at the truth, which one usually finds only in a woman." He had also a liking for , , , , and the . He saw most of the pieces which were produced from time to time, but he delighted in the irregular drama, the shows and booths and circuses."

"... in collaboration with Harrington I wrote an entertainment for Mr. George Case, a well-known musical man and player of the concertina, who retired from the orchestra on his marriage with a Miss Grace Egerton, a pretty and uncommonly sprightly and clever little actress, who ought to have done better things. In buying a pair of horses from a dealer, the experienced purchaser is generally aware that he will become the owner of a good animal and a bad one, and the writer of entertainments for a married couple is very often in an analogous position."

"I have heard Dickens described by those who knew him as aggressive, imperious, and intolerant, and I can comprehend the accusation; but to me his temper was always of the sweetest and kindest. He would, I doubt not, have been easily bored, and would not have scrupled to show it; but he never ran the risk. He was imperious in the sense that his life was conducted on the sic vole sic jubeo principle, and that everything gave way before him."

"... No one succeeds better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat according to his cloth. Here he flattered the aristocracy; but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Washington became the idol of his worship, the "" the object of his bitterest attacks. These last-named lectures have been dead failures in England, though as literary compositions they are most excellent."

"Gone is , with its very wide open pens and cattle-hutches; and gone with it is a good deal of the scandal of driving the wretched beasts through the streets, and whacking and torturing them in the most dreadful fashion. Enormous hordes of cattle for Smithfield Monday market, then—not as now, sent up by rail, bur driven long tedious journeys—used to arrive at on the Saturday, and pass the Sunday in the fields let out for the purpose."

"Seriously, Frank Churchill, it's time you began to look after a wife. In our profession, especially, it's the greatest blessing to have some one to care for and to be petted by in the intervals of business-strife. There used to be a notion that a literary man required to be perpetually 'seeing life,' which meant 'getting drunk, and never going home;' but that's exploded, and I believe that our best character-painters owe half their powers of delineation to their wives' suggestions. Women,—by Jove sir!—women read character wonderfully."

"I look back to the six years which I passed at the with very little pleasure. The headmaster, Dr. Dyne was a capable pedagogue enough, not more than usually narrow-minded, priggish, and conventional. He was a type of the old-fashioned pedantic school, which looked upon Oxford as the "hub of the universe," thought the study of Latin and the primary object of our creation, despised modern languages and foreign countries, and believed thoroughly in the virtues of corporal punishment."

"In those days, too, we used to lunch at places which seem entirely to have disappeared. The is not so frequently met with as it was thirty years ago. The "alehouses" were, in fact, small shops fitted with a and a counter; they had been established by Mr. Crowley, a brewer of , on finding the difficulty of procuring ordinary public-houses for the sake of his beer; and at them was sold nothing but beer, es, bread and cheese, but all of the very best."

"But far the best of all these panoramic shows was the series exhibited at the in , called "The Overland Route," and representing all the principal places between Southampton and Calcutta. This was the work of those admirable scene-painters, and William Telbin, and was executed in their painting-rooms in , , a notorious thieves' quarter. The human figures were by , the animals by and . Such a combination of excellence had never seen, and a clear, concise, and most pleasantly delivered descriptive comment on the passing scene by , an author and journalist of the day, enhanced the success, which was tremendous."

"Smart soldiers like to be well tightened in: Loose habits would destroy all discipline."

"The least drop in the world I do not mind: "Cognac"'s a noun I never yet declin'd."

"My dog, who picks up everything one teaches, Has got "three heads," like Mr. Gladstone's speeches, But, as might naturally be expected, His are considerably more connected."

"This gardener's rule applies to youth and age, When young sow wild oats, but when old grow sage."

"Life's too short for chess."

"Love levels all,—it elevates the clown, And often brings the fattest people down."

"He was no coward, but it had suddenly struck him that the present was a very ill-chosen time for a row with his younger relative, however successful might be the issue. Such violence should not go unpunished, but vengeance is a dish that can be eaten cold."

"To the truly benevolent mind, indeed, nothing is more satisfactory than to hear of a miser denying himself the necessaries of life a little too far and ridding us of his presence altogether."

"May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of the aid that shall never come, ere the God of the poor take him into his hand."

"I had never had a piece of toast Particularly long and wide, But fell upon the sanded floor, And always on the buttered side."

"... What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don't find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us together, or trap us behind screens?"

"At the age of 39 I was fairly sure I would spend the rest of my life alone. I lived alone, I worked alone. No matter what I did, or who I dated, I didn’t seem to be able to find the relationship I longed for. ... Ian was nearly three decades older than me, but all the same we quickly became friends. We were both passionate gardeners, and we’d take tours around our patches, pointing out the plants we were most proud of. ... We didn’t just love each other. We were in love with each other. We were the foundation of each other’s lives. We decided to get married that summer. Suddenly there was no time to waste. ... ... I used to worry I’d never meet anyone and now I live in terror of Ian’s death. He’s the same age as my parents; I know it’s likely that I’ll lose them all at around the same time, a loss so cataclysmic I can barely begin to fathom it. I worry about my sweet husband vanishing into the blind alleys of dementia. I worry about blood clots, bowel cancer, a heart attack, a stroke."

"... If you're a writer who works in biographies, you discover that that the people you're writing about aren't very nice. Not always. Sometimes they're wonderful."

"… If some of England’s seemingly sublime gardens were economically dependent on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of America and the West Indies, others were contingent upon the practice of , the legal process of taking the formerly open fields, commons and wasteland of the medieval period into private ownership."

"Mr Charles Moore announced he will be stepping down in April after six years as editor [of The Spectator], during which time the magazine's circulation doubled to 37,000 and advertising revenue increased tenfold."

"When Sir Keir rightly attacked anti-Semitism in his party, he did not analyse its nature clearly enough. It is not like the old Right-wing anti-Semitism which regarded Jews as creepy foreigners. Rather it a lethally political cocktail of two things – whites on the hard Left who hate anything white, Western or British, and Islamists who, for pseudo-religious reasons, see Jews as the eternal enemy and imagine Allah is telling them to take Palestine by slaughter."

"People are often silly in their attacks on these things. Elites are inevitable and have some good qualities. Any old society will and should have an establishment. Yet a mark of greatness in politics is a capacity to transcend these elites – witness Churchill, who was born into one, and Thatcher, who was not. Jenkins did not do this. Unlike his wife, says Campbell, he was "handicapped by the wish to please'". He most wished to please the grandees who fitted his rather definition of the word "civilised"."