University Of Cambridge Alumni

"I do not load you with personal assurances; but I never knew a time when I thought it more incumbent upon me to exert myself in support of the government; and I rejoice, for your sake and for my own, that affairs are put into your hands, where my private friendship, and my political opinion unite, in engaging me to do all I can, and call upon me to act in character; and how great had my difficulty been, if a contrary determination had put me under the necessity, of demurring between the support of the king, and reconciling my conduct with the measures of those, who are incapable of acting a right part, where interest, ambition, or vengeance, can at all influence their actions."

"Gentlemen, the honour you have done me for many years in intrusting me with being your representative has dignified me to an advanced age in life, so that I may now sincerely say that I am grown old in your service, but I hope that, now that no other consideration will divert me from prosecuting every scheme to promote the trade of the County of Sussex which is a maritime and corn country: and the bounty for debenture to encourage the exportation of corn having been falsely reported to be taken off, I must beg leave to assure that no such thing was intended. Well must I consider what the consequence of such an act would be which must reduce the rent of lands a third in value, greatly lessening the estates of all landed gentlemen, impoverish gentlemen and yeomen of small fortunes, and farmers of long leases must be inevitably ruin'd. As trade and particularly the corn trade is the chiefe concern of the County of Sussex, it shall be my constant care to encourage and support the same be encouraging our farmers in their agriculture and extending our commerce abroad we have no reason to fear being what we ever have been, a rich and powerful people."

"The Memorial I have read, and doubt not its being a very proper one; I am no judge of the propriety of such draughts, especially in French, which language I understand very imperfectly. But that we must speak strong, and abide by what we say, I know very well."

"Surely, Sir, I am not to look upon every man as my enemy who differs from me in opinion upon any point of religion. This would be a most unchristian way of thinking; therefore I must think, that the Jews are in much the same case with the other dissenters from the church of England: we ought not to look on them as enemies to our ecclesiastical establishment, but as men whose conscience will not allow them to conform to it; therefore we may, in charity we ought to, indulge them so far as not to endanger thereby our ecclesiastical establishment; and from them we have less danger to fear than from any other sort of dissenters, because they never attempt to make converts, and because it would be more difficult for them to succeed in any such attempt."

"Pelham was a timid and peace-loving politician, without any commanding abilities or much strength of character. He was a good man of business, and both an able and an economical financier. His temper was somewhat peevish, but his manners were conciliatory, and his opinions were tolerant. Though not a brilliant orator, he was an able debater and an excellent parliamentary tactician. His speeches were marked by readiness and common-sense."

"It has been remarked by a firm friend of Mr. Pelham, that, in the House of Commons, his language was often timid and desponding; and that the candour and openness of his temper, led him occasionally to depreciate the resources of the country, and to magnify the strength of the rival power. On no occasion was this remark more strongly verified, than in this debate; for, though his general arguments against any intemperate provocation of France, while the two states seemed to be in perfect amity, were sound and unanswerable, yet it cannot be denied that he made too many concessions in favour of France, and said, what it did not become a British minister to admit, that England was unable to cope single-handed with the House of Bourbon."

"My brother has all the prudence, knowledge, experience and good intention that I can wish or hope in a man."

"Lord Sandwich having abused Lord Rockingham in the House of Lords, Lord Gower said to him, "Sandwich, how could you worry the poor dumb creature so!""

"I REJOICE very much in the spirit which now seems rising in all parts of this country. Yorkshire has done itself great honour in taking the lead, and I am happy that so much sense and discretion prevailed in the outset of the business at the meeting of York... My mind, I confess, is by no means at ease in regard to certain rumours respecting some vague and crude propositions, which I am told are likely to be brought forth. I don't like the idea of tests, and especially on vague and unexplicit propositions. The being elected a representative, if it implies a trust, is most highly honourable, but if it is to lock up your reasoning faculties of deliberating and judging, and is to tie you up beforehand, and preclude you from acting according to your conscience at the moment, I think it would be a disgraceful bondage, and what many men of the nicest sense of honour cannot submit to."

"Was I ever discriminated against? There are two kinds of discrimination: explicit and implicit. For the most part, explicit discrimination did not affect me much. However, in retrospect, implicit discrimination—for example, the fact that I was so isolated as a postdoc because I could not share in college life—as well as my own internalized misogyny, did have a significant effect, though I hardly noticed this at the time. Another important factor, and one that I was aware of, was pervasive but not overt: it was very rare that women became professional scientists in Britain at the time, largely because science (and particularly “hard” as opposed to “life” science) was considered such a very unfeminine thing to do. ... These days, when most of the obvious barriers to women’s participation in mathematics have been removed, there still remain very strong and insidious internal barriers, shown in such phenomena as stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. The prejudices that lead to people accepting as completely normal that women should not get degrees at Cambridge (they first could get Cambridge degrees in 1948) are very strong and do not disappear immediately when the external barrier is removed. ... In the 1960s there were, of course, very visible manifestations of the idea that academic life is not for women. At the time, most Ivy League universities in the States did not admit women, and in Britain almost all the colleges at the most prestigious universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were single sex."

"The past few years have seen several exciting developments in the field of symplectic geometry, and a beginning has been made towards solving many important and hitherto inaccessible problems. The new techniques which have made this possible have come both from the calculus of variations and from the theory of elliptic partial differential operators. This paper describes some of the results that obtained using elliptic methods, and then shows how applied these elliptic techniques to develop a new approach to , which has important applications in the theory of 3- and 4-manifolds as well as in symplectic geometry."

"Symplectic geometry is the geometry of a closed skew-symmetric form. It turns out to be very different from the with which we are familiar. One important difference is that, although all its concepts are initially expressed in the smooth category (for example, in terms of differential forms), in some intrinsic way they do not involve derivatives. Thus symplectic geometry is essentially topological in nature. Indeed, one often talks about symplectic topology. Another important feature is that it is a 2-dimensional geometry that measures the area of complex curves instead of the length of real curves."

"Over the past 15 years symplectic geometry has developed its own identity, and can now stand alongside traditional Riemannian geometry as a rich and meaningful part of mathematics. The basic definitions are very natural from a mathematical point of view: one studies the geometry of a skew-symmetric bilinear form ω rather than a symmetric one. However, this seemingly innocent change of symmetry has radical effects. For example, one dimensional measurements vanish since ω(v, v) = −ω(v, v) by skew-symmetry. ... The theory has two faces. There are two kinds of geometric subobjects in a symplectic manifolds, hypersurfaces and Lagrangian submanifolds that appear in dynamical constructions, and even-dimensional symplectic submanifolds that are closely related to Riemannian and complex geometry. As we shall see, the analog of a geodesic in a symplectic manifold is a two-dimensional surface called a ."

"... Gelfand amazed me by talking of mathematics as if it were poetry. He tried to explain to me what von Neumann had been trying to do and what the ideas were behind his work. That was a revelation for me — that one could talk about mathematics that way. It is not just some abstract and beautiful construction but is driven by the attempt to understand certain basic phenomena that one tries to capture in some idea or theory. If you can’t quite express it one way, you try another. If that doesn’t quite work, you try to get further by some completely different approach. There is a whole undercurrent of ideas and questions."

"On two different occasions recently, (male) mathematicians asked me in all innocence: But you surely never suffered any discrimination?"

"[On the mass closure of children's playgrounds during the pandemic lockdowns] It was a decision taken by people who have no real life experience of what it's like to be stuck at home with a toddler."

"[From MacNamara's written evidence] For example, the long-term impact of a generation of young people being deprived of schooling and peer-group contact for an extended period of time were hard to bring in as a balancing argument because the harm was not immediately quantifiable, or amenable to being reduced into a data set and presented in a diagram. Similarly, less visible impacts suffer in this format. I remember it being far too difficult to get people to pay attention to domestic violence and lockdown - and the No 10 Private Secretary (Hannah Young) having to push back against the assertion that it was not an urgent problem because it was “not showing up in the data"."

"[At the start of 2020] [T]he Cabinet Office in Whitehall had developed some unhealthy habits in terms of ways of working and it was a low trust environment in terms of relationships between the civil service and the prime minister and his political team."

"If I think about working for [[Theresa May|[Theresa] May]], I don't think there's any world in which we could have got from January to May [2020] and had this sort of culture, because it just wasn't there in the DNA of the organisation at that time."

"[From MacNamara's written evidence] In terms of the policy response the exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences, including the lack of thought given to childcare in the context of school closures. There was a serious lack of thinking about domestic abuse and the vulnerable, about carers and informal networks for how people look after each other in families and communities."

"[Boris Johnson's "breezy confidence" about COVID in March 2020] It was the day on which there was a question about whether the Prime Minister should shake hands with people on a visit to the hospital and there was a jokey discussion about alternative greetings to handshakes. The Prime Minister felt - not unreasonably - that it was a bit ridiculous for him to suggest alternative greetings. But the jovial tone, the view that in implementing containment measures and suspending work and schooling, the Italians were overreacting, and the breezy confidence that we would do better than others had jarred with me. I remember saying that I thought that all people wanted to know was what was the right thing to do - and that was not clear."

"[Referring to the Cabinet Office and No. 10 Downing Street] I would find it hard to pick one day when the regulations were followed properly inside that building. [...] I know that because ... there was one meeting where we absolutely adhered to the guidance, to the letter, and that was the cabinet meeting, and everybody moaned about it and tried to change it repeatedly. So I know how exceptional it was to really, really, really properly follow the guidance."

"[MacNamara provided a Karaoke machine for a lockdown-defying gathering for someone who was leaving No. 10 Downing Street] My profound regret is for the damage that’s been caused to so many people because of it, as well as just the mortifying experience of seeing what that looks like and how rightly offended everybody is in retrospect. [...] I absolutely knew and thought it was actually important for there to be space for - particularly the private office - to be able to gather together and spend time together. That was entirely because of the kind of culture that they were working in and entirely because I was really worried about individuals breaking and suffering, and whether they were going to be okay, and how important their colleagues were to each other. I'm saying none of that in excuse of my own misjudgment. I'm saying none of that in excuse of thinking any of these things were okay. But it was a much more complex situation than has allowed to be presented for lots of different reasons."

"I do not remember anyone working in the centre or who was part of the conversations who had a detailed understanding of the way the NHS operated. This is not unusual or unique to that time. Social policy and the "operational" management of the state is always under-represented in the centre of power whereas HM Treasury, foreign policy and national security are over-represented in line with what is normally the focus for a Prime Minister."

"[From MacNamara's written statement about a meeting in the prime minister's study on on Friday, 13 March 2020] I have just been talking to the official Mark Sweeney, who is in charge of coordinating with the Department for Health. He said I have been told for years that there is a whole plan for this. There is no plan. We are in huge trouble. I have come through here to the Prime Minister’s office to tell you all that I think we are absolutely f-----. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people. As soon as I have been told this, I have come through to see you. It seems from the conversation you are having that that is correct."

"Eton made a much more profound impact on me than Cambridge, which I would say really made none, and all my attitudes and real friends were made at Eton. The friendships I made at Eton provide the entire infrastructure for my life now. It is probably true to say that of the 10 close male friends I have, certainly eight are Etonians, and I have not the slightest doubt that it will remain so until I die. I am bound to say that if I meet somebody that I have never met before, for example, if I am travelling abroad, or through work or something, and it emerges that they were at Eton, I feel an interest in them that is multiplied by at least 10. There are certain people who weren't there, and I do admit that in some strange and awful way I think, "Now, why weren't they?" and that it counts against them slightly. If we are being completely candid, I do accept that I prefer the company of Etonians to the company of people from any other school in the world."

"Ultimately, if Greer is saying we need to take rape less seriously, she needn't worry … society is already doing a pretty great job of that all by itself."

"I was in a school last week and I asked the girls if there are any situations where women are not treated with respect. There was an uproar, all of them shouting: "Yes, the boys in our year call us sluts and slags more than they use our real names. Yes, we're told that we have to send them pictures of our breasts and if we don't, then we're uptight and we’re prudes." This stuff isn't, like, isolated incidents. This is stuff that's coming up again and again."

"[On changing surnames on marriage] We wrangled back and forth over this – he would have been happy to take my surname, but already had a friend with the identical name. Would that be weird? We dismissed double barrels. We considered the new trend for combining the two names into a hybrid – this worked for friends with the surnames Sand and Smith (giving them the magical-sounding Sandsmith). But neither Baylor nor Tates has quite the same romantic ring. Of course, the simple thing is to keep one's own name and get on with it. But for me there was something meaningful about making a shift in our official identities. Eventually, my fiance came up with a simple solution: we'd each take the other's surname as an extra middle name, leaving our surnames unchanged. Problem solved. (Until, as my mum pointed out, we might have to think about what surname to use for any children, but hey, we'll need something to talk about once we're married.)"

"[On the media's short attention span] This is no longer anything to do with me at all. It's about the 60,000 women's voices and the strength of those stories. Regardless of whether someone wants to interview me next week, it doesn't matter at all as long as people are still fighting."

"[On a couple's engagement] As for the man asking "permission" from the bride's father, one friend expressed my thoughts exactly: "If I'm going to get married, I sure as hell want to be the first to know about it.""

"When women talk about any kind of misogynistic abuse, three things happen. We are told that we should stop making a fuss. We are told that it could be worse. We are told that other issues are more serious. At the Hay festival this week, Germaine Greer told us all three."

"I don't think someone in a predatory position, behaving in an abhorrent way towards young girls, would have looked at the Sun and thought there was nothing wrong with their behaviour, but they would have looked at it and thought: "I’m going to get away with it.""

"[Definition by Bates of Everyday Sexism as published om the project website in 2014] To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualisation and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women’s bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape."

"[The irony defence of misogynistic material] Previously, you got people to engage because it's just jokes. Now, if it's being watched 11.4bn times, it doesn't have to be a joke any more, because the strength is in numbers."

"[Misogynistic and sexist attitudes during her career as an actor] I asked other women if they'd experienced attitudes of this sort. I found myself thinking back about all the incidents I'd never really thought twice about and saying, "Oh, my God, this is huge. Why am I putting up with it?" I couldn't believe how many of these women had hundreds of stories."

"If 'extremist' views are illegal, then the person who defines 'extremism' has the power to curtail free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and freedom of association. This is the path to authoritarianism."

"Some people think that gender critical views are 'extreme'. I think decriminalising abortion to birth is 'extreme'. Opposition politicians think the current government is 'extreme'."

"If Britain is to reverse its decline, we would do well to follow the example of countries like Hungary. Of course, high profile policies like building giant border fences would not translate directly into the British context, but we can learn from the principles behind them."

"We have got a problem in this country with knowing what the problem is but not being able to do anything about it."

"What does it even mean to "undermine British values" when there is no consensus — and certainly no legal definition — of what those values are?"

"Perhaps we could ask the Church of England to return to their day job and marry people for free."

"[On a lack of "hope for the future" discouraging the young from becoming parents] That hope is sadly diminishing in so many of our young people today, because liberal individualism has proven to be completely powerless to resist the cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls. When culture, schools and universities openly teach that our country is racist, our heroes are villains, humanity is killing the Earth, you are what you desire, diversity is theology, boundaries are tyranny and self-restraint is oppression, is it any wonder that mental health conditions, self-harm and suicide, and epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion characterise the emerging generation? We must end the indoctrination of our children with destructive and narcissistic ideologies, instead protecting childhood, training children in the timeless virtues and teaching them how to love our country."

"For children are not an economic burden. They are not a threat to personal autonomy or a lifestyle choice. Children are a joy and a blessing, they are the symptom and the cause of a society that has hope. Our children are the reason that we seek to rebuild a nation whose future is prosperous, safe and free."

"The problem with this point of view represented by those who subscribe to gender ideology is that they don't respond to rational debate with counterarguments. They respond to it with cries of 'bigots', or cries of trying to silence people who express an opposite point of view. That's what is so frustrating."

"I think ... I'm uncomfortable ... I believe every human being is equal before God. That's my faith position. I don't think we can get away from the fact that abortion is taking human life. There are obviously balances of rights, and I'm not an absolutist at all."

"As a woman, I fully understand the threats to dignity and safety that the Bill poses, because it will change the social contract. In this country, we recognise that in toilets, changing rooms and public spaces, there are areas where only women are allowed. In a restaurant recently, I had an experience where a man dressed as a woman walked into the toilets where I was on my own. He stood behind me and stared at me in the mirror, looking me in the eye. I have no idea whether he intended me any harm, but my evolved instinct as a woman was to be frightened, because unlike in almost any other species, women are far less powerful than men and we cannot defend ourselves. [Interruption.] No, it is a fact. The difference in strength between men and women is phenomenal, which is why we have separate sex categories for sport. Women are evolved to be wary of men in intimate spaces, which is why we have single-sex spaces and why they must continue to exist for the safety and privacy of women. The Bill threatens that social contract."

"[On gender ideology] If there's one place where a woman should be able to speak up about these issues, that should be parliament."

"Yet trans activists have succeeded in campaigning for biological males who identify as female to be allowed into women’s sports, women’s hospital wards and women’s prisons, even when these trans women still have intact male genitalia. This is not acceptable, and presents a serious threat to women’s safety, as well as our sex-based rights."

"[On motherhood] Some young people are led to believe it's all drudgery [...] 'It’s a noose around your neck.' But most people don't regret having children. We don't talk openly enough as a society about what's great about being a mum or a dad. We talk about what's great about a career, and that's fine. But we should talk about other fulfilling things in life."