Editors From England

"The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man.And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains."

"There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence."

"It is not the eye, but the eyelid, that is important, beautiful, eloquent, full of secrets. The eye has nothing but its colour, and all colours are fine within fine eyelids. The eyelid has all the form, all the drawing, all the breadth and length; the square of great eyes irregularly wide; the long corners of narrow eyes; the pathetic outward droop; the delicate contrary suggestion of an upward turn at the outer corner, which Sir Joshua loved."

"A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it back—it is already so far."

"Childhood is but change made gay and visible."

"Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act."

"Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk."

"Oh, when His wisdom can mistake, His might decay, His love forsake, Then may His children cease to sing, — "The Lord omnipotent is King!""

"We were marching down the street, and we were at the head of the troops. We went on marching, and the troops went off to the left."

"I was brought up to believe that cricket is the most important activity in men's lives, the most important thread in the fabric of the cosmos."

"Before we were old enough to practise at the nets with the Burslem men, we played most of our cricket on waste land that had been trampled flat by the clogs and boots of generations of miners."

"Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved."

"Grattan-Guinness has achieved a synthesis here of remarkable historical and mathematical scope and sensitivity. His book is a 'must read' for historians of science and mathematics, as well as mathematicians."

"Grattan-Guiness's uniformly interesting and valuable account of the interwoven development of logic and related fields of mathematics . . . between 1870 and 1940 presents a significantly revised analysis of the history of the period. . . . [His] book is important because it supplies what has been lacking: a full account of the period from a primary mathematical perspective."

"Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure to all but a few specialists."

"In addition, the teaching of theories from axioms, or some close imitation of them such as the basic laws of an algebra, is usually an educational disaster."

"The teaching of axioms should come after conveying the theory in a looser version."

"The great historian of logic and mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away about a month ago, aged 73. ... Ivor's work and scholarship spans over an impressive range of topics and areas, and is bound to continue to influence many generations of scholars to come. It is a great loss."

"Mathematics occupies a peculiar position in cultural life today. 'Everybody knows' that it is one of the most basic, and also ancient, types of knowledge; yet it is not part of normal cultural discourse, and few people know much about its historical development, or even that it has a history."

"Non-Newtonian calculi... have considerable potential as alternative approaches to traditional problems."

"From the 3rd century onwards, orthodox Christianity, based on a Hebrew story and worshipping the Jew Jesus, also led many campaigns of anti-Semitism."

"It [ non-Euclidean geometry ] would be ranked among the most famous achievements of the entire [nineteenth] century, but up to 1860 the interest was rather slight."

"When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written."

"Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right."

"So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge."

"Historians may lie, but History cannot."

"Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it."

"We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire."

"Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage."

"Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world."

"I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog's-ear place of these pages the warning, "Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.”"

"In the sect – fairly large and yet unusually choice – of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels."

"[It] is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times."

"But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast."

"Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare."

"The Book of History is the Bible of Irony."

"Maitland was the antithesis of Stubbs: Maitland is the historian of situations, Stubbs of development. It is fashionable now to depreciate Stubbs and to praise Maitland, and it is easy to see why this has happened. Maitland's precise concepts and lucid exposition are attuned to modern scientific requirements; Stubbs's muddy generalizations and anachronistic concepts are correspondingly irritating. But it should be remembered that Maitland left out those things which elude definition: human character and deep-seated change. There are no portraits in Maitland's history and little sense of social development. All things considered, I believe that Stubbs was the greater historian, but Maitland has more to teach us now."

"From the teacher's point of view it is a notable fact that of late years English constitutional history has become at once more interesting and of higher educational value. If recollections of the undergraduate's standpoint as it was twenty years ago are to be trusted, the earlier part of the subject was deposited in three sacred volumes, which were approached by the devout disciple in much the same spirit as that in which the youthful Brahmin draws near to the Vedas. To read the first volume of Stubbs was necessary to salvation; to read the second was greatly to be desired; the third was reserved for the ambitious student who sought to accumulate merit by unnatural austerities—but between them they covered the whole ground. The lecturer lectured on Stubbs; the commentator elucidated him; the crammer boiled him down. Within those covers was to be found the final word on every controversy, and in this faith the student moved serene."

"The mental food of which I was most in need at that time was a strict regimen of the modern type of scientific history at its best, to supplement the sweet cake of Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, etc., on which I was gorging myself. Warner gave me that in the form of Stubbs' Constitutional History, without discouraging my love-reading of brighter authors. Stubbs, moreover, was an invaluable introduction to the Middle Ages, hitherto almost a blank spot in my knowledge. I wrote out a full analysis of the three volumes in three massive notebooks."

"Stubbs is a name always to be mentioned with veneration in the Oxford History School. He is without doubt the greatest of Oxford historians, as Maitland is equally preeminent among Cambridge men. They have no peers. During the seventeen years in which he was Regius Professor, from 1867 to 1884, the History School changed from being "an easy School for rich men" into an academic discipline of a serious kind."

"He was, so it seems to me, a narrator of first-rate power: a man who could tell stories, and who did tell many stories, in sober, dignified, and unadorned but stirring and eloquent words. If an anthology were to be made of tales well told by historians, and the principle of selection paid no heed to the truthfulness of the passages, but weighed only their verisimilitude and what may be called their aesthetic or artistic merits, Dr Stubbs would have a strong right, and hardly any among the great historians of his day would have a stronger, to be well represented."

"What are we to say of the Constitutional History? Perhaps I have just one advantage over most of its readers. I did not read it because I was set to read it, or because I was to be examined in it, or because I had to teach history or law. I found it in a London club, and read it because it was interesting. On the other hand it was so interesting, and I was so little prepared to criticise or discriminate, that perhaps I fell more completely under its domination than those who have passed through schools of history are likely to fall. Still, making an effort towards objectivity, must we not admire in the first instance the immense scope of the book—a history of institutions which begins with the Germans of Caesar and Tacitus and does not end until a Tudor is on the throne? Then the enormous mass of material that is being used, and the ease with which this immense weight is moved and controlled... While the institutions grow and decay under our eyes we are never allowed to forget that this process of evolution and dissolution consists of the acts of human beings, and that acts done by nameable men, by kings and statesmen and reformers, memorable acts done at assignable points. In time and space, are the concrete forms in which the invisible forces and tendencies are displayed. When compared with other books bearing a like title Stubbs's Constitutional History is marvellously concrete."

"Of all the men whose names I have heard mentioned in connection with the Modern History Chair I should consider Stubbs decidedly the most eligible. He is, I believe, a moderate Conservative—at all events a good Churchman and one whose teaching on religious questions would be thoroughly trustworthy. He is also one whose ability and knowledge would make the appointment unobjectionable. I do not know him personally, but from all I hear of him I should think he is the nearest approach to a Conservative of all the candidates of whom I have heard."

"The work of...Stubbs claims a still higher rank. It shows what can be made of documents, when historic powers of the highest order are brought to bear upon them. We have seldom seen a single volume which was, so thoroughly and almost without a figure of speech, a library in itself. It is hardly too much to say that Mr. Stubbs has here got together all that any one can want to know on his subject, unless he is going to write a book about it, and that, if a man is going to write a book about it, he will find in Mr. Stubbs' volume the best possible guide to his materials."

"[I]t was Stubbs who did the most to consolidate the new idea of the historical enterprise... The latter [Select Charters of English Constitutional History] was to help apprentice historians to learn to deal with original documents, so that they might try to emulate works like Stubbs's own Constitutional History, which remained the standard work and the exemplar of institutional history until well into the twentieth century. As a model, the Constitutional History taught that history should be rooted in original sources, balanced and temperate in judgements, highly detailed and analytical, and severe and austere in tone."

"Stubbs was primarily a master of all the literary sources of English history between, say, 950 and 1400. In this field he has never been surpassed. How often even now, after searching in vain for a decisive contemporary witness for this or that fact or judgment, do we find that the Bishop, seventy years ago, put it for us in a footnote or an obiter dictum! Few historians would be the worse for reading Stubbs's Introductions and vol. II of the Constitutional History once every four or five years. This intimate knowledge of the period gave Stubbs a background of flesh and blood and mind in all his work. It also made him the master of all those who later broke new ground, and he became as it were father and grandfather of his pupils and pupils' pupils who developed new trends."

"What first struck the readers was its [The Constitutional History of England] massive and organized learning. The book overflowed with indications that its author had an unusual familiarity, not only with existing secondary works, but also—and more particularly—with the relevant original authorities that were then in print. Throughout the book it was to these original authorities that the main attention was steadily directed."

"It is our considered view that no student of the early history of our constitution can dispense with reading it [The Constitutional History of England] ... I would say at once, with all the force at my disposal, that there is no nineteenth-century historian towards whom it is less possible to be condescending without condemning oneself as unfit to study history."

"[H]e was able to undertake and fully complete an original work of historical synthesis which remains one of the most astonishing achievements of the Victorian mind. On many particular points in his History, scholars would now say Stubbs has been superseded as more subtle and complex explanations have come into fashion, but on no point can it be said that Stubbs' judgment was completely without merit or that the thesis he propounded did not have a plausible basis in the contemporary documentation. And as a general interpretation of the significant trends in the history of medieval English government, the Constitutional History remains the holistic work to which all subsequent research has had to be related."

"No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising. We are taken behind the scenes and shown the ropes and pulleys; we are taken into the laboratory and shown the unanalysed stuff, the retorts and test tubes; or rather we are allowed to see the organic growth of history in an historian's mind and are encouraged to use the microscope. This "practical demonstration," if we may so call it, of the historian's art and science from the preliminary hunt for manuscripts, through the work of collation and filiation and minute criticism, onward to the perfected tale, the eloquence and the reflexions, has been of incalculable benefit to the cause of history in England and far more effective than any abstract discourse on methodology could be."