Academics From England

"His Majesty said he was sorry to lose him, and should always remember his services: that he feared the Duke's private fortune had suffered by his zeal for the House of Hanover: that his Majesty was desirous to make any amends in his power in any way that should be most agreeable: and added that it was a debt due to his Grace. The Duke answered that in office he had never considered the profit of employment: that out of office he could not bear the thought of being a burthen and charge on the Crown: that if his private fortune had suffered by his loyalty, it was his pleasure, his glory, and his pride: and that he desired no reward but his Majesty's approbation."

"But my own greatest debt to the Duke was the discovery of Namier... I was delighted above all in his portrayal of the great Duke of Newcastle, for me the very quintessence of the anti-hero, a personage of delightfully unglorious proportions."

"It moves one to compassion to think of the poor old Duke himself. A man once possessed of £25,000 per annum of landed estate, with £10,000 in emoluments of government, now reduced to an estate of scarcely £6,000 per annum, and going into retirement (not to say sinking into contempt) with not so much as a feather in his cap."

"The cause of his [William Pitt] quitting the Ministry was from a difference of opinion in a capital measure relative to Spain, as you know; the favourite united with the Minister of numbers [Newcastle], bore down the Minister of measures [Pitt], and by that means in effect removed him from the King's Council, and deprived him of the means of further serving the public."

"The character of the reputed ancestors of some men, has made it possible for their descendants to be vicious in the extreme, without being degenerate. Those of your Grace, for instance, left no distressing examples of virtue, even to their legitimate posterity, and you may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree, in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to insult or upbraid you. You have better proofs of your descent, my Lord, than the register of a marriage, or any troublesome inheritance of reputation. There are some hereditary strokes of character, by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face. Charles the First lived and died a hypocrite. Charles the Second was a hypocrite of another sort, and should have died upon the same scaffold. At the distance of a century, we see their different characters happily revived and blended in your Grace. Sullen and severe without religion, profligate without gaiety, you live like Charles the Second, without being an amiable companion, and, for aught I know, may die as his father did, without the reputation of a martyr."

"What can one say of the D. of G., but that his whole conduct is childish, insolent, inconstant, and absurd—nay, ruinous? Because we are not in confusion enough, he makes everything as bad as possible, neglecting on one hand, and taking no precautions on the other. I neither see how it is possible for him to remain minister, nor whom to put in his place. No Government, no police, London and Middlesex distracted, the Colonies in rebellion, Ireland ready to be so, and France arrogant, and on the point of being hostile!"

"He was punctual in his dealings; kind to his domestics; hospitable to strangers, and faithful to his friends. His abilities and his application were never duly appreciated; but, indeed, very few had any fair opportunity of judging of them. "To be moderate," says Erasmus, "amidst the extremes of party, is the first principle of patriotic courage." But moderation, alas! in those times, was utterly unknown; however, such strong mists of prejudice now no longer prevail, and whenever a true estimate is made of his Grace's character, the good and the honourable will greatly predominate; at least, the humble individual who offers this slight sketch, and still laments his loss, will always retain a just and grateful regard for his memory."

"Though I wrote this letter merely with a view of acquainting you with the state of this bill, I cannot let this opportunity go by, of assuring you how very happy I feel to be of opinion on public affairs, with a person, with whom I have always wished to agree; and with whom I should act with more pleasure, in any possible situation, than with any one I have been acquainted with."

"[T]he Duke of Grafton like an apprentice, thinking the world should be postponed to a whore and a horse-race."

"It is impossible to present a more honourable trait of this noble Duke's character, of his virtues as a patriot, or of his talents as a statesman, than...his Grace's speech, in the House of Lords, on the 30th of May, 1797."

"On the whole it was thought advisable to postpone the issuing of the Proclamation, which, at this time, would only appear as finding fault only with the People for their Joy too riotously testifyed at the late Election, & in that consideration might committ rather than give weight to the Ministers of Government. Every Step of Precaution for the last Night's Security of the Town, as well as for the future was also directed to the Civil Magistrate, as also planned for the Military."

"But what is your present situation? ... Great Britain is stript of, or deserted by, every ally on the Continent that could bring any essential aid: the last of whom, and an ally whose exertions might fairly be boasted of, if report says true, and this House has no other information, is just not our enemy."

"I must nevertheless have trod very warily on ground that seemed to come any ways under the denomination of an insult on the Crown. That, my lord, is, and always has been a rule laid down by me which I will most religiously observe, that nothing in which I engage against His Majesty's ministers, whom I disapprove, shall ever be carried on by me with the shadow of offence against his person or family."

"As to Ireland: That kingdom must be considered to be in so critical a state, that unless a reform, a temperate reform in Parliament, and a full emancipation of the Catholics, together with a total change of the men who now conduct the affairs in that country, take place, and directly, if it be not now too late, we shall soon see that Ireland added to the list of Republics, which the fatal measures of our Ministers have been the cause of erecting and establishing all over Europe: but with this difference, that if a Revolution takes place in Ireland, it will inevitably produce a Revolution in Great Britain. Of no position in politics was I ever so assured of as of this, I protest: an axiom from which no arguments will ever be able to withdraw my reason."

"Notwithstanding the several offices the Duke had filled, and the extensive patronage he had possessed, yet at no time did he secure for himself, nor for any of his children, although he has a numerous family, any place, pension, or reversion, whatever."

"I went as I think every acquaintance is almost bound to do, to see Mr. Wilkes in his confinement, to hear from himself his own story and his defence; and to shew that no influence ought to stop the means of every man's justifying himself from an accusation, even though it should be of the most heinous kind. Hearing the shyness of lawyers in general to undertake his cause, as also the manner (perhaps unwarrantable) of his confinement, I was more desirous than ever to shew, that as far as my small power could extend, no subject of this country should want my countenance against oppression."

"Lord Bute had the ill-natured arrogance to compliment him on his retirement: the Duke replied with a spirit that marked his lasting ambition, "Yes, yes, my Lord, I am an old man; but yesterday was my birth-day, and I recollected that Cardinal Fleury began to be prime minister of France just at my age.""

"To prevent these greatest of evils extending hither, it will be wise to oppose the only effective remedy, which I earnestly recommend to the cool and dispassionate consideration of all your lordships: I mean a temperate Parliamentary Reform in this country, without which the Constitution will slip from under us."

"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."

"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."

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

"... 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."

"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 ."

"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."

"The Labour Party breached the Equality Act by committing unlawful harassment against Jews by employing antisemitic tropes and by characterising complaints of antisemitism as fake smears. The cases adjudicated, says the EHRC report, were "the tip of the iceberg"."

"Corbyn himself was imbued in antisemitic politics, and defended antisemites against Jews. Antisemitism, like other racisms, is about what you do, it's not about who you think you are. Apologists are now saying that Corbyn didn't do enough to tackle antisemitism. That gets things the wrong way round. Corbyn was the antisemitism."

"One key fact about contemporary antisemitism is that it must not be mentioned. Antiracists are educated to assume that talk about antisemitism is an indicator of a Zionist attempt to silence the oppressed Palestinians; it is mis­recognized as the mobilisation of Jewish victim­power, the playing of the Holocaust card. The left is not hostile to Jews when they are powerless and stateless; but it finds it hard to shake the idea that Jews are untrustworthy and are connected to money. The image today is that the Jews have managed to strike a bargain with the American and capitalist devil; instead of playing their role as the symbol of the oppressed, they are conceived of as having saved themselves at the expense of everybody else."

"Germaine Greer first impinged on my own life in my final year as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. We women students were all gathered together in the college hall for the annual Founder's Day Feast, and as we finished eating, the principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian voice reverberating round the room. At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression."

"The repulsive Paul Gadd — or Gary Glitter — as I cannot bring myself to call him because of its frivolous connotations says he wants police protection because some "nutter" might kill him. I'm not sure how much of a nutter one would have to be to want to kill Gadd, a convicted paedophile with a penchant for small girls. Most rational people would find it quite acceptable if he were to be taken out and shot in the back of the head, and will be regretting that he came through his three years in a Vietnamese jail in quite such good shape. I am not for a moment suggesting that anyone outraged by the existence of Gadd, or who fears for their own children when this man is loose on British soil, should take the law into his own hands. I do, though, fail to see how making him sign the sex offenders' register is going to make the blindest bit of difference. The police have better things to do than to protect this piece of filth. The only reason why they should stick close to him, though, is to keep him away from our children."

"The Russian Revolution and Soviet policy were seen by others, both at the time and subsequently, in part in terms of earlier concerns. Sir Halford Mackinder, Britain’s leading geopolitician as well as a politician, was British High Commissioner in South Russia during the Russian Civil War. He pressed the Cabinet in January 1920 on the danger of ‘a new Russian Czardom of the Proletariat’ and of ‘Bolshevism, sweeping forward like a prairie fire’ towards India, the core of Britain’s overseas empire, and ‘lower Asia’. Such accounts presented Communism as giving renewed energy to established geopolitical drives, notably the Russian threat to the British empire in South Asia (the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’), and to British interests and influence in South-West Asia. This theme has been given even longer-term resonance in some recent scholarship. In offering a borderland perspective on the origins of the Cold War, significantly after the latter was over, Alfred Rieber saw the Cold War as ‘a phase in a prolonged struggle over the Eurasian borderlands that stretches back to the early modern period, when the great polyethnic, bureaucratic conquest empires began to reverse a thousand years of nomadic military hegemony over sedentary cultures’. More of the literature looked for continuity between the Soviet Union and Romanov Russia, and notably with the expansionism of both, for example the search for warm-water ports."

"Knowledge, as we have said before, is one. Its division into subjects is but a concession to human weakness."

"It was remarkable how few people were asking: How does what America is doing or threatening to do or will do as an occupying force — how is that likely to resemble what America did in Vietnam? And how far do the illusions of universal primacy and of supposedly defending freedom and democracy against its enemies — how is that contributing, in fact, to the militarization of U.S. policy and the undermining of global peace?"

"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."

"It would mean the end of civilization. As innumerable studies have shown, it would be exceptionally difficult in those circumstances to avoid escalation to total nuclear war... Humanity as such would survive in extremely poor shape. America, Russia, Europe would not."

"Incidentally, the argument here that this is necessary because it’s up to the Ukrainians — at this point, what is the first country that would be completely destroyed? Has anyone thought of asking ordinary Ukrainians if that is a price they think worth paying?"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"Looking at the hundred or so scores I have done you might question the choices, but in a lot of ways this business is about relationships."

"Natural history studies are fun, rewarding and an invaluable source of information."

"In recent decades the effects of environmental change on insect populations has been the focus of my research. It is widely recognised that invasive alien species, climate change and habitat destruction are all major players in the declines of many insects. Ladybirds are no exception."

"From the outset in 1917, the Communists believed in a utopian ideology, extreme, organised violence, atheism, a redefined place of the individual that served to reject Enlightenment precepts, and the rejection of preceding Russian history. During the Civil War and the 1920s, the Orthodox Church was crushed, with the slaughter of tens of thousands of priests and monks, and the desecration and destruction of churches, monasteries and the tombs of saints. The real and spiritual landscapes of Russia and the psychological life of the people were transformed as a consequence. Communism in its own way therefore constituted a major civilisational challenge to the notion in Europe and North America of a 'Western Civilisation', whether or not articulated explicitly in this fashion. This civilisation owed much to Christianity and placed considerable weight on liberalism and toleration. From this perspective, Communism, drawing both on a reconceptualisation of Russian authoritarianism and on a new, totalitarian ideology and practice, posed a counter-civilisational challenge with its own precepts, aims, methods and anticipated outcomes."

"The continued dynamism of successive Islamic societies produced fresh bouts of conquest that led to new sources of slaves. Thus, on the eastern end of the Islamic world, Mahmud of Ghazni, south-west of Kabul (r.971–1030), whose empire stretched from the River Oxus to the River Indus, launched numerous raids into northern India from the 990s, annexing the Hindu state of Sahi to the east by 1021. Religious factors played a role in his attacks, which in 1022 extended far down the Ganges valley and in 1026 into Gujarat. Chroniclers claimed that his campaign of 1024 yielded over 100,000 slaves. Such numbers fed a major slave trade into Central Asia, Persia and Iraq, as well as bringing wealth to the army. The Delhi sultanate (1206–1526), established by Qutb-ud-din Aybak, who had been a military slave of the Churid Sultan Muizz u-Din, so that it is sometimes referred to as the Slave Dynasty, in turn, used Turkic slave soldiers from Central Asia as well as local Hindu soldiers. This sultanate took part in largescale slave raiding in India.... The island of Bali in the East Indies (Indonesia) was a source of Hindu slaves for the Muslim world... The campaigns in India of the Mughals and the Deccan sultanates produced many Hindu slaves, some of whom were sold on to Central Asia and Persia... In India, the Mughals enslaved rebels and those deemed rebels, for example, Hindus who rejected attempts at proselytism, as at Benares in 1632. Those captured in Mughal campaigns were often given to the troops for their use or for them to sell. Enslavement was also the fate of peasants who could not meet their taxes and rents, with men, women and children often sold to Muslim lords as a consequence. Further south in India, enslavement was used by the Deccan sultanates, notably Bijapur and Golconda, in suppressing opposition. These major Muslim states campaigned extensively into southern India and enslaved Buddhists, Hindus and others. Thus, in the 1640s, Golconda seized much of the state of Vijayahagara and Bijapur that of Mysore. However, the Mughal conquest of the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda in the 1680s led to the end of military slavery there... India was also a source of slaves, for example with girls taken to Afghanistan and the Middle East and, from the mid-seventeenth century, forced labour moved to plantations in the Dutch-ruled coastlands of Sri Lanka."

"Between 1750 and 1900, Britain became the foremost power in the world, both territorially and in economic terms. An intellectual powerhouse, Britain also became a model political system for much of the world. These changes were connected. Territorial expansion provided raw materials, markets and employment and, combined with Protestant evangelicalism and liberal self-confidence, encouraged a sense in Britain of being at the cutting edge of civilisation. Indeed, empire was in part supported on the grounds that it provided opportunities for the advance of civilisation. This was seen not least by ending what were regarded as uncivilised as well as un-Christian practices, such as widow-burning and ritual banditry in India, and slavery and piracy across the world."