Academics From England

"One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by , poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use). Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine — foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere."

"The imminent public health crisis facing poorer countries as a consequence of COVID-19 will be further deepened by an associated global economic downturn that is almost certain to exceed the scale of 2008. It is too early to predict the depth of this slump, but many leading financial institutions are expecting this to be the worst recession in living memory. [...] Closely connected to this are the measures put in place by governments and s since 2008, most notably the policies of and repeated cuts. These policies aimed at propping up s through massively increasing the supply of ultra-cheap money to financial markets. They meant a very significant growth in all forms of debt — corporate, government, and household."

"It is not enough to speak of solidarity and mutual in our own neighborhoods, communities, and within our — without raising the much greater threat that this virus presents to the rest of the world. Of course, high levels of poverty, precarious conditions of labor and housing, and a lack of adequate health infrastructure also threaten the ability of populations across Europe and the United States to mitigate this infection. But grassroots campaigns in the South are building coalitions that tackle these issues in interesting and internationalist ways. Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive political rhetoric of and xenophobic movements — a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with s, and a "my country first" national patriotism."

"We are entering an alarming situation where many poorer countries will face increasingly burdensome debt repayments while simultaneously attempting to manage an unprecedented public health crisis – all in the context of a very deep global recession. And let us not harbor any illusions that these intersecting crises might bring an end to or the emergence of some kind of "global social democracy." As we have repeatedly seen over the last decade, capital frequently seizes moments of crisis as a moment of opportunity — a chance to implement radical change that was previously blocked or appeared impossible."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"Workers in lower status jobs tend to have more stressful working conditions—they have lower pay, poorer pension arrangements, less control over their work, and report more unsupportive colleagues and manager."

"I am pretty confident in saying that the physiological stress levels (as measured by cortisol) of bosses are lower than their employees—in other words, the bosses are not as stressed as the employees they manage, this is shown not just by my study, but loads of other studies that show exactly the same results. Stress levels increase (not decrease) as we go from the top of the occupational ladder to the bottom."

"Taking, then, this fact as established, it suggests itself as probable that circumcision was by Divine command made obligatory upon the Jews, not solely as a religious ordinance, but also with a view to the protection of health.... One is led to ask, witnessing the frightful ravages of syphilis in the present day, whether it might not be worth while for Christians to adopt the practice."

"The chief processes for the improvement of soils which may be discussed here are: liming, claying and marling, warping, paring and burning, and green manuring. Most of these more or less directly improve the land by adding to it certain plant food constituents which are lacking, but the effect of each process is in reality very complex. In the majority of cases the good results obtained are more particularly due to the setting free of " dormant " or " latent " food constituents and to the amelioration of the texture of the soil, so that its aeration, drainage, temperature and water-holding capacity are altered for the better."

"Among the world's crops wheat is pre-eminent both in regard to its antiquity and its importance as a food of mankind. In prehistoric times it was cultivated throughout Europe, and was one of the most valuable cereals of ancient Persia, Greece, and Egypt."

"The wheat taxonomist has a difficult job. The variation in Triticum/Aegilops is extraordinary and one has only to look through the enormous herbarium collection of wheat that John Percival amassed to see the diversity. Hybridization and polyploidy have occurred frequently and been assisted by man over a long period, complicating the systematics enormously."

"On this question of armour it cannot be too strongly insisted that anything less than the thickness necessary definitely to stop the projectile is worse than useless; a "mushroomed" bullet, possibly accompanied by a few detached fragments of steel, is infinitely more disagreeable and dangerous than a bullet which has not been upset."

"Mr. Lanchester seems to be the first man who has considered and mastered the fact and theory of every phase of the subject before sitting down to write."

"The salmon may be cited as typically fish-shaped fish."

"[B]y the end of the nineteenth century... ...a rapid change had set in. Men were no longer convinced that the writers of Scripture knew more about a future life than they did themselves. Historical criticism began to suggest that writers who were far from infallible in their descriptions of the past were not wholly to be trusted in their prognostications of the future.""

"When I was doing Bean more than I've done him in the last few years, I did strange things; like appearing on chat shows in character as Mr. Bean. I remember going to a book signing as Mr. Bean; it was a Mr. Bean book; and I signed it as Mr. Bean. I just wrote "Mr. Bean" in the book rather than Rowan Atkinson. I was there in costume and in character for the entire time; from arriving in the store till leaving it at the end of the book signing; and it was a fantastically kind of freeing experience, because I could just submerge myself in this character and just behave however I liked. And I didn't care what I did or what I said to anyone; I just became this other person, and it was a wonderful sort of freedom. A wonderful kind of fantasy, where you could just be this thoroughly rather unpleasant, selfish man for an hour; in a totally real context rather than in a fictional context. It was rather extraordinary, actually, and something that I found rather pleasing and rather relaxing."

"[The French] are so uncompromising in their view of the world, which is why they are such a fantastically rich source of comedy. They are so relentless and so clear in their view of things, and they won't be shoved off that position by anything. What's also good is that, generally speaking, making jokes about the French appears to be something that nobody really minds. The French don't even care, they just go about their lives regardless."

"I cry too much and I find it strange. It must be indicative of some issue within me that I’ve yet to identify. Whether it’s crowds or whether it’s people being nice… Hospitals make me cry very, very easily. Merely entering a hospital – just sensing care, you know. People trying to help others, I find, inspires a very emotional response."

"When presented with an audience or a camera, usually [my stammer] disappeared, but by no means all the time. I can show you some outtakes of Blackadder or The Thin Blue Line when I get to some B's followed by a vowel, which is my real bête noire."

"It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential. Every joke has a victim. That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous....In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything."

"[O]ne must know that pride is one of the seven deadly sins, so one shouldn't exhibit pride in anything...I don't know...what do I get pride and satisfaction from? I can't think of anything I'm absolutely proud of. If I've done jokes that people liked, then that is pleasing and satisfying. I think probably the thing that I enjoyed in the show, the franchise, the brand or whatever you want to call it, the thing that I found the least stressful might be Blackadder, the sitcom I did in the 1980s. That was good because of this feeling of shared responsibility among a lot of really good actors."

"The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you're with us or against us. And if you're against us, you deserve to be 'cancelled'. It's important that we're exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who's a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future."

"The victimisation of individuals or corporations or groups of people is a very dangerous and difficult development. The fact that careers can be ruined and reputations can be savaged without any particular responsibility on the part of those who are doing it… we live in strange times."

"It’s the age-old dilemma of being known for doing a certain thing in a certain way. And even if people think, “Well, we could cast him in this role,” then they say, “He just brings a lot of Mr. Bean baggage with him and would people take it seriously?” I can see myself in some Dickensian role, those sorts of characters. But I think I might have burnt my bridges with the outright silliness of so much of what I’ve done."

"All jokes about religion cause offence, so it's pointless apologising for them."

"I am getting older, and [Mr. Bean] naturally has to get older with me, and that's why I've done him very little in recent years. Because I don't particularly want him to get old. I've always seen him as a rather timeless, ageless figure — though, in fact, when we were doing this funeral sketch a few weeks ago, quite a few people said you know there's something about Bean in middle age which feels almost more right; he sort of suits an older outlook."

"Personally I suspect that I am highly unlikely to be arrested for whatever laws exist to contain free expression, because of the undoubtedly privileged position that is afforded to those of a high public profile. So my concerns are less for myself, and more for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile. Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse 'gay'. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a 'cult'. Or the café owner arrested for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen."

"Then, too, although Arnold was sceptical of the many stories of conversion under pressure to Islam in the time of Aurangzib, he did not extend the same questioning spirit towards stories of peaceful conversion by saints. In 1965, Dr. S. A. A. Rizvi was to suggest that zamindars retailed these stories in order, in the period when the British were making revenue settlements, to establish their proprietory rights over larger areas of land by an assertion of superior ancestry through connexion with Muslim saints.... But even he whose avowed intention was to portray Islam as a peaceful missionary religion analogous to missionary Christianity of the 19th century, finds that "It is established without doubt that forced conversions have been made by Muhammadan rulers in India.""

"Another lofty claim of mythic proportion being perpetuated about conversion to Islam is that a heterodox variety of Muslims, namely the Sufis, had propagated Islam through peaceful missionary activity. British historian Thomas Arnold (1864–1930)—desperate to alter the centuries-old European discourse of Islam as a violent faith—initiated this propaganda in the 1890s, which has been embraced by numerous Muslim and non-Muslim historians and scholars."

"Official pressure is said never to have been more consistently brought to bear upon the Hindus than in the reign of Aurangzeb. In the eastern districts of the Punjab, there are many cases in which the ancestor of the Musalman branch of the village community is said to have changed his religion in the reign of this zealot in order to save the land of the village. …. Many Rajput landowners in the Cawnpore district, were compelled to embrace Islam for the same reason to save the family property from confiscation. In other cases, the ancestor is said to have been carried as prisoner or hostage to Delhi, and there forcibly circumcised and converted. It should however be noted that the only authority for these forced conversions is family or local traditions and no mention of such is made in the historical accounts of Aurangzeb’s reign. It is established, without doubt, that forced conversions have been made by Muhammadan rulers, and it seems probable that Aurangzeb’s well known zeal on behalf of his faith has caused many families of Northern India (the history of whose conversion has been forgotten) to attribute their change of faith to this, the most easily assignable cause."

"Muslim Spain had written one of the brightest pages in the history of mediæval Europe. Her influence had passed through Provence into the other countries of Europe, bringing into birth a new poetry and a new culture, and it was from her that Christian scholars received what of Greek philosophy and science they had to stimulate their mental activity up to the time of the Renaissance."

"This passage was cited by Thomas W. Arnold in his Preaching of Islam to support his contention that the most important agents in the spread of Islam in the Deccan were peaceful Muslim saints. While Arnold's general argument may have a good deal of valid- an argument that will be explored in greater depth in the present study, it would seem that in the case of Pir Ma‘bari he ‘chose the wrong example to illustrate it. For the question arises: why did Arnold cite a tradition, the 1884 Bombay Gazetteer, which presented only one side, the “peaceful missionary” side, of Pir Marais life? One possibility is that the hagiographic traditions such a the one quoted above were unknown to Arnold and that he had available to him only the Gazetteer version. Another possibility is that Arnold was aware of the Sufi’ militancy in the hagiographic traditions but chose to ignore it, an interpretation that would accord with the general effort in his books to revise the simplistic nineteenth-century image of Islam as religion of the sword. But it does not suffice to correct one distorted view by presenting an equally distorted, if opposite, view. If the Sufis peaceful character can be supported by both ‘written and oral traditions, so can his militancy. In view of the tendency of both oral and written traditions to extol or even fabricate the pious qualities of Sufis, it is most likely that Pir ‘Matbari like Sufi Sarmast, was in reality a militant Sufi and only acquired the reputation of peaceful missionary through generations of oral transmission of his life story."

"It was from this and much other material that Arnold reached his conclusion that vast number of Indian Muslims are descendent of converts in whose conversion force played no part and in which only the teaching and persuasion of peaceful missionaries were at work."

"[T]he jizyah was levied on the able-bodied males, in lieu of the military service they would have been called upon to perform had they been Musalmans; and it is very noticeable that when any Christian people served in the Muslim army, they were exempted from the payment of this tax. Such was the case with the tribe of al-Jurājima, a Christian tribe in the neighborhood of Antioch who made peace with the Muslims, promising to be their allies and fight on their side in battle, on condition that they should not be called upon to pay jizyah and should receive their proper share of the booty."

"[In many cases] there is no doubt that the shrine of a Muslim saint marks the site of some local cult which was practised on the spot long before the introduction of Islam."

""The tomb of alae ‘Masud is said to occupy the site of a former temple of the sun, and the mosque of Shaykh Saddu at Amroha was also originally a temple. The Panj Pir are undoubtedly reminiscent of the Pandavas, the five hero brothers of the Mahabharatta, and it is significant that the shrine of Sakhi Sarwar (in the Dera Ghazi Khan District) contains, besides the tomb of the saint and his wife, a shrine dedicated to Babu Nanak, and a temple to Vishnu, and that Hindus believe that Shah Madar is an incarnation of Lakshman, the brother of the God Rama.’"

"Their energies at all times impetuous were now solely concentrated upon executing the injunctions of the 'king of fierce countenance, understanding dark sentences' that they should enforce belief at the point of the sword which was emphatically declared to be 'the key of heaven and of hell."

"In the hours of its political degradation, Islam has achieved some of its most brilliant spiritual conquests: on two great historical occasions, infidel barbarians have set their feet on the necks of the followers of the Prophet, - the Saljūq Turks in the eleventh and the Mongols in the thirteenth century,- and in each case the conquerors have accepted the religion of the conquered. Unaided also by the temporal power, Muslim missionaries have carried their faith into Central Africa, China and the East India Islands."

"WHEN a botanist first enters on the investigation of so remote a country as New Holland, he finds himself as it were in a new world. He can scarcely meet with any certain fixed points from whence to draw his analogies; and even those that appear most promising, are frequently in danger of misleading, instead of informing him. Whole tribes of plants, which at first sight seem familiar to his acquaintance, as occupying links in Nature's chain, on which he has been accustomed to depend, prove, on a nearer examination, total strangers, with other configurations, other economy, and other qualities; not only all the species that present themselves are new, but most of the genera, and even natural orders."

"I meet amateur composers all the time who have music flooding through their heads, apparently, but they have no technical ability at all. They don’t actually have the faintest idea how to put it down on the page. These days you can actually get away with that, because you sort of mess around and track it, and all those things. But to my mind, that balance between the excitement of what is called inspiration or just simply a good idea, and the technical routine that goes into writing music down at all, is what makes a composer. You can’t have one without the other and be a complete composer. I can’t imagine how you could."

"Good music really adds something creative to the film, something which wasn’t there before, an element which wasn’t in the film before. You can be working with very distinguished directors and actors and designers and so on. I take film music very seriously, and every time I do a film, I insulate myself by saying, “This is good, and I’m going to do a good job.” If I went through the film music I do, the commercial work I do, thinking this is just awful and it’s to pay the bills, I would be ashamed of myself. I never have done that. I try and add something really good to each film I do, really the best I can do for that film, but it ain’t writing novels. It’s not a symphony; it’s applied music."

"Well I'm sure he's got a great many merits, but thus far they've been fairly effectively concealed from public view."

"They are entitled to their opinion, but they suffer from the notable disadvantage of being completely wrong."

"The ICGS Bullying and Harassment Policy was breached repeatedly and extensively by the most senior Member of the House of Commons. In all, 21 separate allegations were proved and have been upheld. The House may feel that his conduct brought the high office of Speaker into disrepute. This was behaviour which had no place in any workplace. Members of staff in the House should not be expected to have to tolerate it as part of everyday life. ... [T]he respondent [Mr Bercow] has been widely unreliable and repeatedly dishonest in his evidence. He has attempted to defeat these complaints by false accusations of collusion and by advancing lies. ... The findings of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, which we have upheld, show that the respondent has been a serial bully. [...] His evidence in the investigations, the findings of the Commissioner, and his submissions to us, show also that the respondent has been a serial liar. His behaviour fell very far below that which the public has a right to expect from any Member of Parliament. The respondent’s conduct was so serious that, had he still been a Member of Parliament, we would have determined that he should be expelled by resolution of the House. As it is, we recommend that he should never be permitted a pass to the Parliamentary estate."

"All I can say is that the case against me would have been thrown out by any court in the land since it is based on the flimsiest of evidence, rooted in hearsay and baseless rumour, and advanced by old school dogmatists once intent on resisting change at all costs and now settling some ancient scores with me. Add to that a dash of personal spite and you have some idea of the vengeful vendetta mounted against me. It is a travesty of justice and brings shame on the House of Commons. This has been a protracted, amateurish and unjust process which would not have survived five minutes' scrutiny in court. To describe what I have experienced as a kangaroo court is grossly insulting to kangaroos. None of the investigators is a lawyer and the Commissioner overseeing them has no expertise whatsoever in the consideration of alleged bullying."

"You need to write out a thousand times, "I will behave myself at Prime Minister’s Questions"."

"You are an incorrigible delinquent at times. Behave yourself, man!"

"It’s a point so blindingly obvious that only an extraordinarily clever and sophisticated person could fail to grasp it."

"Difference of opinion is of the essence of politics. There is an elaborate combination of finger wagging and head shaking going on which may be personally therapeutic but is institutionally disadvantageous."

"At the 2017 election, I promised my wife and children that it would be my last. This is a pledge I intend to keep. If the House votes tonight for an early general election, my tenure as Speaker and MP will end when this Parliament ends. If the House does not so vote, I have concluded that the least disruptive and most democratic course of action would be for me to stand down at the close of business of Thursday, October the 31st. Least disruptive because that date will fall shortly after the votes on the Queen's Speech expected on 21st and 22nd October. The week also after that may be quite lively and it would be best to have an experienced figure in the chair for that short period."