Biographers From England

"As every physicist knows, Dirac was, in the words of Niels Bohr, "the strangest man of quantum mechanics" — someone deeply private, of very, very few words, rectilinear in thinking, virtually, apparently devoid of empathy with other human beings, always an outsider."

"'Einstein is completely cuckoo'. That is how the cocky young Robert Oppenheimer described the world's most famous scientist in early 1935, after visiting him in Princeton. ... Einstein had been trying for a decade to develop an ambitious new theory in ways that demonstrated, in the view of Oppenheimer and others, that the sage of Princeton had lost the plot. Einstein was virtually ignoring matter on the smallest scale, using quantum theory. He was seeking an ambitious new theory, not in response to puzzling experimental discoveries, but as an intellectual exercise—using only his imagination, underpinned by mathematics. Although this approach was unpopular among his peers, he was pioneering a method similar to what some of his most distinguished successors are now using successfully at the frontiers of research."

"‘The greatest living theoretical physicist’ – many commentators in the past few decades have described Steven Weinberg in such terms. When I rather cheekily asked him what he thought of that statement, he shot back: ‘It is quite ridiculous to rank scientists like that’, adding with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but it would be impolite to dispute the conclusion’. That reply was classic Weinberg: self-aware, intimidatingly direct but always ready to lighten the moment with humour."

"... One of the most vocal skeptics is the Standard-Model pioneer Martin Veltman: 'String theory is mumbo jumbo. It has nothing to do with experiment.'... But is clear from the comments that Dirac repeatedly made in his lectures on the way theoretical physics should be done that he would have disagreed with those criticisms: he would have counselled string theorists to let the theory's beauty lead them by the hand, not to worry about the lack of experimental support and not be deterred if a few observations appear to refute it. But he would have cautioned string theorists to be modest, to keep an open mind and never to assume that they are within sight of the end of fundamental physics. If past experience is anything to go by, another revolution will eventually follow. Such was the advice of this extraordinarily unemotional man offered to his colleagues: be guided, above all, by your emotions."

"I entered the Ashram hall on the morning of my arrival, before Bhagavan had returned from his daily walk on the hill. I was a little awed to find how small it was and how close to him I should be sitting; I had expected something grander and less intimate. And then he entered and, to my surprise, there was no great impression. Certainly far less than his photograph had made. Just a white-haired, very gracious man, walking a little stiffly from rheumatism and with a slight stoop . . . ‘The change came a few weeks later at one of the big festivals of the Ashram year [Osborne quotes what he wrote at the time] ‘There were huge crowds for the festival and we were sitting in the courtyard outside the hall. Bhagavan was reclining on his couch and I was sitting in the front row before it. He sat up, facing me, and his narrowed eyes pierced into me, penetrating, intimate, with an intensity I cannot describe. It was as though they said: “You have been told; why have you not realised?” And then quietness, a depth of peace, an indescribable lightness and happiness. Thereafter love for Bhagavan began to grow in my heart and I felt his power and beauty . . .’"

"The recognition of Pure Being as one's Selfand the Self of the universe and of all beings is the supreme and ultimate truth, transcending all other levels of doctrine without denying their truth on their own plane. This is the doctrine of Advaita, non- Duality, taught by the ancient Rishis and pre-emmently by Shankaracharya. It is the simplest as well as the most profound, being the ultimate truth beyond all the complexities of cosmology."

"‘A day or two later,’ Osborne wrote, ‘my wife entered the hall and sat down. Immediately Bhagavan turned his luminous eyes on her in a gaze so concentrated that there was a vibration she could actually hear. She returned the gaze, losing all sense of time, the mind stilled, feeling like a bird caught by a snake, yet glad to be caught. An older devotee who watched told her that this was the silent initiation and that it had lasted about fifteen minutes. Usually it was quite short, a minute or two. She wrote to me that all her doubts had vanished; her objections no longer mattered . . .’"

"In the fog of war Mr. Horne manages to show exactly what was happening, without ever going beyond the evidence. The book combines good history and good reading."

"His best achievement...shows him at the peak of his power."

"Unlikely to be challenged as the definitive account of one of the most efficient and astonishing campaigns of all time."

"One of the best written on the whole Algerian drama."

"Occasionally an epic subject encounters a fine historian. This the the case with the Algerian war and Mr Horne. The result is a book of compelling power, written with compassion and understanding."

"It is clear that Horne's own political sympathies lie on the middle ground of rational reform and cooperation, none the less valuable for the fact, that, as the struggle in Algeria grew in ferocity, the centre began to vanish from sight."

"Above all, what was most lacking on the French side was the will to fight. The memories of the 1,500,000 dead of the First World War, the sapping effects of the Front Populaire, the unhelpfulness of Britain as a military partner in the interwar years (even by September 1939 four divisions were all she could send to France), appeasement, Hitler's bloodless victories and the appallingly swift smashing-up of Poland had all left their mark, as had the lethargy of the months of the "phoney war"."

"But what really matters is...the question: "How many divisions does the Pope have?" In Chile it has been the concentrated fire power of the "divisions" of militant trade unionists that has enabled Allende to carry through his revolutionary programme (thereby, incidentally, bringing the economy to ruin and the country to the verge of civil war). And, in the British context of, say, 1980, on whose side could one count the comparable trade union "divisions"? With the "Lib-Labs" or the "Soc-Labs"?"

"Alistair Horne has written a brilliant reportage-narrative history, highly compressed, using sources mainly hostile to the Commune, and rarely quoting any official publications of the Commune or the memoirs of the survivors. Yet it pulsates with deep feeling and conveys the mood of the time. Its rich illustrations are a boon for the reader. Ideological issues are dismissed, and events are seen as a deep human tragedy."

"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."

"There should also be a presumption that the authorities should stop taking more power over people and should start handing power back. Why should trial by jury be curtailed, or the assets of people suspected of profiting from crime be seized, or the Customs and Excise have the power to enter your house? Why should the police be able to subject drivers to random breath tests, or to spy on the public through CCTV, or the Government keep information on you that it shares across departments, or tell you whom to employ, or intercept your electronic communications?"

"Looking forward, as one always must, I wonder if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one's dog. Until now, this would have been considered disgusting, since marriage has been a law revolving around sexual behaviour, and sexual acts with animals are still, I believe, illegal."

"Labour insiders are more aware than most voters of the danger of the weird alliance between punitive Muslim extremists who believe women are inferior, homosexuals should be killed etc and the usually white hard-left Corbynites whose social agenda is completely different but share Islamist hatred of Israel and the West."

"Mr Horne's book, recounting events in Germany since 1952, fills an important gap, for there is an obvious danger in discussing Germany's future always in terms of her past. This is journalism at its best, in the tradition of the great foreign correspondents of the 1930s, not pretending to be history but retelling, with all the liveliness of the born reporter and without prejudice, as remarkable a story as any in the post-war decade. If ever a book was topical, this one is: here is the background to the Geneva talks in their most important sector."

"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."

"It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."

"They make excellent life-partners. No doubt some old bigots will claim that marriage is a uniquely human institution, but it won't take long to find enlightened vicars who believe that human and canine dignity is in a very real sense enhanced by recognising inter-species unions."

"How much survives of the other peacetime prime ministers since the war? What were John Major and Harold Wilson and Anthony Eden for? Won't Tony Blair's manic grin end up as ruined as Ozymandias's "wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command"? Among the great might-have-been-prime ministers, most fall into one of two traps. On the one hand are the too greedily ambitious, the Denis Healeys who don't stand up to the enemy at the moment they should, and the Michael Heseltines, who are too impatient of the system that they seek to dominate. On the other are the prophets – the Bevans, Benns and Powells – who may be more original than their more conventional rivals, but cannot be called successful."

"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"."

"The burden should not be on people to prove why they should be allowed to do something, but on the authorities to prove why they shouldn't. Thus, why shouldn't people be free to hunt, or smoke cannabis, or build an extension to their house, or travel without an identity card, or read pornography on the internet, or adopt children? There may be reasons to prevent any or all of these things, but the restrictors should be the ones who have to make their case."

"I was in Chile shortly after Allende came to power, and predicted the economic ruin to which his regime reduced the country. That, coupled with the recent escalation in the arming of extreme left-wing para-military groups, seemed to make at least a temporary military take-over inevitable sooner or later, if all-out civil war was to be averted. The activities of Señor Corvalán's Communist Party, sub rosa, indeed bore a large responsibility for the chaos and generation of hatreds which led to the present intervention by the military. Equally...Chile is now in a "kind of civil war", and therefore draconian measures (of brief duration, one hopes) by the new regime have to be expected."

"It is not in South-east Asia, the Middle East or Africa that the ideological battle of the seventies seems likely to be waged, but in South America. Here, one feels, may well be the battleground where the orthodoxy of Soviet communism will triumph definitively over Maoism, or vice versa."

"Many years ago, I went to a party in central London thrown by a host known for curating interesting and heavyweight guest lists and, on entering, encountered David Irving, the disgraced historian and Holocaust denier. As a marker of social pariahdom, Holocaust denial is up there with – or perhaps even more potent than – a conviction for sex offences, and I turned around and walked out; not through any particular moral superiority, but because I thought "notoriety" as a criteria for inclusion on a guest list was stupid and offensive. As I left, I remember looking across the room at the host and thinking: you silly bloody bint, I'm embarrassed for you."

"For reasons that have never been clear to me, the call centre for my insurer – a policy bought through a broker in Dubai, regulated in the Channel Islands, and falling under the umbrella of one of the biggest insurers in the US – is located in Scotland, ensuring that the man who picked up my call had to strain as hard as I did to pretend this situation was normal."

"Most of us understand, at least in theory, that marriage is not an achievement but a choice. We have learned to value ourselves apart from the value the dating market puts on us. We own our power and, in some cases, our apartments. We try not to go around saying things like "all the good ones are gone.""

"That city Oxford] is one of the few supreme monuments of European history and civilization, the English equivalent of Florence or Venice."

"That David Cecil understands the work of Shakespeare very thoroughly, and cares for it deeply, I can testify not only from many conversations we have enjoyed through the years, but from the memory of lectures he has given at Oxford. A quarter of century ago, he gave a course on Shakespeare's English historical plays which brought them to life for me as no other teacher had ever succeeded in doing."

"By choosing to write in a typically modern kind, the imaginative biography, he has acknowledged the stimulus of its inaugurator, Lytton Strachey. But Strachey may have sometimes sacrificed truth to literary effect; in contrast, David Cecil is exact and scrupulous. And if his predecessor's tone tended to be one of mockery, his own astringency is mitigated with humour, and his irony with charity. The compassionate spirit of his writing is in his case undoubtedly inspired by his lifelong attachment to the Christian faith."

"His first book, The Stricken Deer, was at the same time a searching analysis of its tragic subject, the poet Cowper, and a vivid evocation of a particular phase of English life. Thus it already reveals his characteristic blend of interests. As a biographer, he has sought to bring out the unique individuality of human beings; to render the very essence of a Thomas Gray or a Max Beerbohm, a Caroline Lamb or a Dorothy Osborne. But he never neglects for long that larger social and spiritual context into which even the quietest of lives is interwoven."

"All who know him will agree that as a man he is characterized by his gay liveliness of mind, and his robust downrightness and common sense."

"What is the secret of his critical gift that distinguishes it from others? Partly, I think, his individual approach, which is easy to recognize but hard to define, because it combines the qualities of the professional and the amateur. Professional in its seriousness, is technical proficiency and its regard for the subject; amateur (in the original sense) of loving or liking the subject too much to let himself be bound by hard-and-fast rules of treatment... [H]is love of literature is too strong a thing to be forced into the channel of a single theme. It overflows its banks for the mere pleasure of it – and as all his readers know, to give pleasure is one of his main objects in writing. Writing without pleasure, given and received, is dead: it is one of the essential differences between art and science."

"To my mind one of his finest achievements in the field of literary criticism is his theory of Emily Brontë's basic intention in Wuthering Heights. By the house and household of Hindley or filched from him by the villain Heathcliff – she means to represent the storm, the aberration from normal human nature. Whereas Thrushcross Grange, in spite of its many vicissitudes, embodies the calm, the restoration of order out of chaos, which wins in the end, after and indeed before Heathcliff's death... Emily's sympathies may have been with the storm rather than the calm, and I think they were; but it was left to David Cecil to discern the broad fundamental contrast between the two worlds of Wuthering Heights."

"F. R. Leavis is more direct in The Great Tradition (1948), which is among other things a running diatribe against Janeite extraordinaire, Lord David Cecil. Leavis dignifies Austen as well as the great tradition of English fiction she originated by insisting on her moral seriousness, and accordingly, the leisured amateurism of Janeites – with their fondness for entertainment, performance and comedy – is noxious to him. His class-based attack upon Lord David, which includes charges of decadence, aestheticism, over-sophistication and evil, contains a homophobically charged gender component as well, for when Leavis casts aspersions on Lytton Strachey and the culture of Bloomsbury, he is aiming to taint Lord David by association."

"His style, polished, urbane, slightly ironical throughout—in short, reminiscent of Strachey's, serves him supremely well as an instrument of character analysis and as a lens through which human passions and follies may be observed with Gibbonian detachment. The Young Melbourne (London, 1939) presented the subtly drawn picture of a young man whose own temperament, half animal vigor and hard common sense, half dreamy speculation and delicate sensibility, mirrored the transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century habits of thought and feeling."

"We got on extremely well; I thought he was wonderful; the most agreeable, intelligent charming man I had met in my life... We used to see each other every day, and we talked for about eight hours every day. Endlessly... He was a very sharp delineator of character. His vignettes were absolutely wonderful."

"Lord David's artistry has fullest play wherever the human element rules supreme, as in his masterly treatment of the relationship between the young Queen and her first Prime Minister. And since this relationship happens to have been perhaps the most significant aspect of Melbourne's Premiership, the book qualifies as an outstanding political biography as well as a moving human portrait."

"Good literary criticism enhances my pleasure. I read David Cecil with delight, whether on Hardy, Cowper, or the Early Victorian Novelists. The sine qua non here is still Wuthering Heights: it has the rugged but certain strength of a Beethoven symphony."

"Since life to them was so secure and so pleasant, the Whig aristocrats tended to take its fundamental values very much for granted; they concentrated rather on how to live. And here again, their ideal was not an artless one. Their customs, their mode of speech, their taste in decoration, their stylish stiff clothes, are alike marked by a character at once polished and precise, disciplined and florid."

"Founded as their position was on landed property, the Whig aristocracy was never urban. They passed at least half the year in their country seats; and there they occupied themselves in the ordinary avocations of country life. The ladies interested themselves in their children, and visited the poor; the gentlemen looked after their estates, rode to hounds, and administered from the local bench justice to poachers and pilferers. Their days went by, active, out-of-door, unceremonious; they wore riding-boots as often as silk stockings. Moreover, they were always in touch with the central and serious current of contemporary life. The fact that they were a governing class meant that they had to govern."

"The eighteenth century was the age of clubs; and Whig society itself was a sort of club, exclusive, but in which those who managed to achieve membership lived on equal terms; a rowdy, rough-and-tumble club, full of conflict and plain speaking, where people were expected to stand up for themselves and take and give hard knocks. At Eton the little dukes and earls cuffed and bullied each other like street urchins. As mature persons in their country homes, or in the pillared rooms of Brook's Club, their intercourse continued more politely, yet with equal familiarity. While their House of Commons life passed in a robust atmosphere of combat and crisis and defeat."

"I cannot recall a time when stories and rhymes and pictures and tunes were not for me the chief source of interest and pleasure in life. I stress the word pleasure. Pleasure has played a large part in my life; pleasure, solitary and sociable, carnal or spiritual; pleasure in the beauties of art and nature, in the enthralling variety of the human scene; and pleasure in jokes. Nothing has been included here, however interesting its subject matter, which does not also give me pleasure."

"Let us announce to the League that we admit Germany's right to development and that we are prepared to concede something to procure it. An impartial commission might then draw up definite proposals. The Germans are far more likely to appreciate the advantage of the collective system if for once it is employed to assist them. They have learnt that they only get things by the threat of force: let us show them we can offer them something concrete by peaceful methods. May I repeat, except for the admittedly searching question of these Colonies, there is no reason why England and Germany should not live in perfect unity together. Let us keep calm and shape a policy in the light of the consoling truth."

"Poetry is usually concerned with what is universal and unchanging in human life; novels necessarily with much that is local and ephemeral. Moreover poetry, almost like music, transcends the limitations of time by appealing to our emotions through our basic primitive sense of rhythm and harmony."