Non Fiction Authors From England

"Gerald Gould was important in George Orwell’s life although they may never have met. As Chief Reader for the publisher Victor Gollancz in the early 1930’s Gould was involved in editing Orwell’s early books. On 17 December 1934 Orwell wrote a letter to about possible changes to '; and listed sixteen changes that Gould, and Harold Frederick Rubenstein, a solicitor, playwright, author and literary critic, had recommended. Orwell made some changes, compromised over others and stood firm on some points."

"To begin with, in the amusement nearest my heart, there was the theatre; and no one with a passion for the play could have arrived at Oxford in a more favourable hour. In the month of my first term the long struggle for the drama at Oxford was crowned with success; and the opened its doors to a performance of Twelfth Night by the ..."

"An affection for animal life was one of 's earliest characteristics. One of the rooms on the second floor was set apart as his den, and here he would sit of an evening, pondering his verses. One night, as he leant from the window, he heard an owl hooting; and, with a faculty for imitation which was strong in him, he cried back to the bird. The poet's 'tu-whit, tu-whoo' was so natural that the owl flew to the wind, and into the room, where it was captured and kept for a long while as a pet. Ingenuity has traced to this story the origin of the later poem 'The Owl,' which catches with singular fidelity an echo of the bird's cry."

"The summer of 1855, when next the were in London, was one of uncommon literary agitation. ... ... Above all other books, was the poem of the year. When the Brownings reached London, the critical bombardment of had begun; and all the various passions of mankind were being exercised in his condemnation and defence."

"We've been caught out in the past by unexpected exhaust products from transport infrastructure. First it was horse manure, then it was CO². This time it's data. We must not make the same mistake again!"

"This is Tom Standage's third pocket-sized book delving into the history of science and engineering, and yet again he has found a subject that is not only fascinating, but which also resonates with contemporary issues. In ', Standage explored the development of the telegraph, which permitted long-distance instantaneous communication for the first time. … In The Neptune File , Standage explained how in the 19th century a new unseen planet was discovered because of its gravitational tugging, which caused Uranus to deviate from its predicted path. … Now we have The Mechanical Turk, the story of the 18th-century automaton that convinced everyone that a machine could play world-class chess, a feat that was only truly achieved in the last decade. Standage reveals how our ancestors reacted to this first apparent example of artificial intelligence. He explains how the machine actually worked, and he brings us up to date with the terrible moment when a computer beat , the world chess champion."

"During Queen Victoria's reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its uses with a deluge of information. ... The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the ."

"As the tides of history have ebbed and flowed, different drinks have come to prominence in different times, places, and cultures, from villages to ancient Greek dining rooms or s. Each one became popular when it met a particular need or aligned with a historical trend; in some cases, it then went on to influence the course of history in unexpected ways. Just as archaeologists divide history into different periods based on the use of different materials—the stone age, the , the , and so on—it is also possible to divide world history into periods dominated by different drinks. Six beverages in particular—beer, wine, , coffee, tea, and —chart the flow of world history. Three contain , and three contain , but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day."

"A man who has made a tolerable progress in humanity, will adopt, and ever bear in mind, the principle of increasing, as far as lies within his power, the quantity of pleasure in the world, and diminishing that of pain: he will establish this to himself as a constant and inviolable rule of action, and in carrying it into practice he will not overlook one created thing that is endowed with faculties capable of perceiving pleasure and pain. He will reflect on who it was that gave these faculties and remember that they were not given to be sported with. He will not esteem the meanest of animals beneath the notice of his humanity because, in the meanest of them, the wisdom and power of the all-benevolent Being are displayed. This is the Being without whom not a single sparrow shall fall to the ground and whose bounty feeds the young ravens that call upon him. His sensibility will be tremblingly alive to the sensations of all animated nature, and he will feel for everything that is capable of feeling: he will look upon pity, kindness, and mercy toward his own species as the weightier matters of humanity, but at the same time, he will consider the humane treatment of animals as more than the tithe of the anise and cummin of it. He will scrupulously do his duty in the former, and in the latter, he will not leave it undone."

"[E]very experiment is cruel which gives pain to an animal, without having for its object the leading to some great and public good."

"Animals are endued with a capability of perceiving pleasure and pain; and from the abundant provision which we perceive in the world for the gratification of their several senses, we must conclude that the Creator wills the happiness of these his creatures, and consequently that humanity towards them is agreeable to him, and cruelty the contrary. This, I take it, is the foundation of the Rights of animals, as far as they can be traced independently of scripture; and is, even by itself, decisive on the subject, being the same sort of argument as that on which moralists found the Rights of Mankind, as deduced from the Light of Nature."

"... Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a catalyst of social transformation, societal organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. From prehistory to the present, the stories of these transformations form a narrative that encompasses the whole of human history. Food's first transformative role was as a foundation for entire civilizations. The adoption of agriculture made possible new settled lifestyles and set mankind on the path to the modern world. But the staple crops that supported the first civilizations— and in the Near East, and in Asia, and maize and potatoes in the Americas—were not simply discovered by chance. Instead, they emerged through a complex process of , as desirable traits were selected and propagated by early farmers. These staple crops are, in effect, inventions: deliberately cultivated technologies that only exist as a result of human intervention."

"[I]t is our duty to cultivate humanity towards animals […] not content merely to rescue animals from pain but to leave them still more abundantly gratified."

"When hackney carriages were first introduced into London — these were the first carriages that you could hail in the streets — so, basically taxis — this led to a massive backlash from .. the incumbent providers of rides in London— who were the . And that was how you used to get around London. You would hail a boat by the river and say “I want to go to ” or “I want to go up to ”. And so they all complained and they said their profits were running away on wheels, because these hackney carriages had showed up."

"The... glimpses we have...of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans , of general prohibitions against processions, worship and ablutions and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensibility and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged."

"In offering to the public a book on Humanity to Animals, I am sensible that I lay myself open to no small portion of ridicule; independent of all the common dangers to which authors are exposed. To many, no doubt, the subject which I have chosen will appear whimsical and uninteresting, and the particulars into which it is about to lead me ludicrous and mean. From the reflecting, however, and the humane I shall hope for a different opinion and of these the number, I trust, among my countrymen is by no means inconsiderable. The exertions which have been made to diminish the sufferings of the prisoners, and to better the condition of the poor, the flourishing state of charitable institutions; the interest excited in the nation by the struggles for the abolition of the slave-trade; the growing detestation of religious persecution—all these and other circumstances induce me to believe that we have not been retrograding in Humanity during the present century: and I feel the more inclination and encouragement to execute the task to which I have set myself, inasmuch as humanity to animals presents itself to my mind as having an important connection with humanity towards mankind."

"Every single act of cruelty contributes something towards generating in the mind an habit of cruelty."

"In 1925 a man called Dan Rider was inspecting the pauper wards of in . He was a volunteer visitor, a member of the public charged with checking on the welfare of those unhappy souls who had been deemed insane and sent to what was still known colloquially as the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. During his tour Rider 'noticed a quiet little man drawing cats': 'Good Lord, man, you draw like .' 'I am Louis Wain,' replied the patient. 'You're not, you know,' I exclaimed. 'But I am,' said the artist, and he was."

"My grandmother was a cat lady. She actually bred s. She also had a lot of books around. So I grew up with that. And the thing is that I found them a bit frightening. ... there is always something slightly odd about Louis Wain's world. ... tensions in people society through cat society ..."

"… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like , though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from at . The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, . Together the newlyweds tramped up to and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory '. Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame."

"I was looking for a subject for my next book and failing to find one. My agent told me that during a recent lunch an editor had mentioned that he thought that the time was right for a new biography of George Eliot. The moment I started writing a biography I realised that the was made for me – or perhaps, more modestly, that I was made for the genre. Biography involves detailed with the ability to tell a jolly good story. And those are the two things I like best in the world."

"It's a cliché, but I think it's an absolutely true one, that the Victorians were obsessed with class. They were obsessed with placing people in particular social categories."

"In the last week of June 1824 Thomas Carlyle, on the cusp of a brilliant literary career, bounced up to meet one of the country's reigning men of letters. You might assume that the twenty-eight-year-old had lots to talk about with the veteran poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was Britain's chief exponent of German Idealism, a tradition in which young Carlyle was himself fluent: his first book, published the following year, would be a biography of the philosopher Schiller. Yet far from a meeting of minds, this encounter between the literary generations might best be described as a repulsion of bodies. Carlyle was barely able to contain his shock at the ruin of the man who shuffled forward to greet him at 3, . Coleridge, he reported to his brother in an appalled post-mortem the next day, was a 'fat flabby incurvated personage, at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes'."

"In the trials that led to the vaccines... adverse events were reported by 38% of those receiving the real vaccine... 28% of those who received the control [dummy, or fake vaccine, of which some were meningitis vaccine] also reported a side-effect. ...[F]ewer than 1% reported a serious adverse event, and of these... slightly more had received the dummy than the active vaccine. ...So there was no evidence of increased risk ..."

"(DVTs) [normally] happen to around one person per 1,000 each year... out of 5 million people getting vaccinated, we would expect... 5,000 DVTs a year, or... 100 every week. So it is not at all surprising that there have been 30 reports."

"In the UK, adverse reactions are reported using the “yellow card”... Up to 28 February, around 54,000 yellow cards have been reported... from... 10 million vaccinations... three to six reports per 1,000 jabs [0.3-0.6%]. That means a far greater number of side-effects are reported in the trials..."

"The most serious problem is anaphylactic reactions, and the advice is not to inject anyone with a previous history of allergic reactions to either a prior [vaccine] dose... or its ingredients."

"[W]hen... there have been 30 "thromboembolic events" after around 5m vaccinations, the crucial question... is: how many would be expected anyway, in the normal run..?"

"We need to think slow instead of fast, and resist drawing causal links between events where none may exist."

"Framing is absolutely vital. ...All the work in communications is driven by the work of psychologists like Kahneman, Tversky...[etc.] The simplest one... is not always to talk about s, but to talk about s, and preferably... to give both. Our predict systems are almost always... positively framed, all in terms of survival. So we draw survival curves, not mortality curves... How long can you be without this condition. ...In a way you should give both, but ...it makes a big difference ...whether you talk about 2% mortality or 98% survival. ...2% mortality sounds rather terrifying while 98% survival sounds rather good, and we don't want to unnecessarily upset people... [W]e are all going to die ...It's 100% mortality in the end, but you want to show a decline in survival ...because it's just fairer and more likely to get people engaged rather than frighten them off immediately. ...[W]hen we ...provide an icon array that shows everybody, it shows the deaths ...patients like it. ...They like seeing out of 100 people ...in 10 years time, how many people are going to be alive ...because they have the chemotherapy now, or dead because of breast cancer...[etc.]"

"It’s a common human tendency to attribute a causal effect between different events, even when there isn’t one present..."

"[S]omeone is diagnosed with autism after receiving the , so people assume a causal connection – even when there isn’t one."

"So far, these vaccines have shown themselves to be extraordinarily safe."

"The figure of the must be one of the most familiar and abiding images in nineteenth-century literature. We know her best in the form of the scandalous of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or as Charlotte Brontë's , the plain orphan who eventually marries her employer, the mysterious . In addition, she appears in scores of other novels from high literature to sensationalist shockers and from Emma to '. Yet it is one of the great ironies of that we know virtually nothing about the 25,000 women who actually worked as governesses during the middle years of the century. Indeed, it is the very power of these fictional representations which has blunted our curiosity about the practice of educating girls at home during the Victorian period."

"We find it very difficult to deal with... low numbers, one in a million, one in a billion... Once I have to start counting the zeros, all intuition and feeling goes. So it's hopeless, and of course we're bad at it. Why should we be good at doing that sort of thing? ...[I]t's more and more reported that people will use this expected frequency format, where instead of talking about... .03 per person year... What does that mean, for heaven's sakes. It's absolutely ridiculous scientific language for something. No, what you say is, out of 100 people... we would expect 3 for this to happen each year. ...You talk about a specific group of people, which you can... draw a... picture of... and that helps enormously. You... want to bring things to... whole numbers, small numbers, preferably between 1 and 100, or between 1 and 50... magnitudes that people have got a feeling for, and... no decimal places, no multiple zeros. You've got to get rid of all of that. You've got to get things to units people can understand, preferably on a scale of 1 to 10."

"Randomised trials have proved the effectiveness of some Covid treatments and saved vast numbers of lives... also showing... overblown claims about treatments... as hydroxychloroquine and , were incorrect."

"s are very valuable in... low probability, high impact events. Every time you cross the road there is a low probability and high impact that you're going to get run over. ...You take extra precautions to reduce... very small risk to... even smaller. ...[O]n an absolute risk scale, you [might] say, "Oh, I'm not going to bother... It's not worth doing..." but... by making that low risk even smaller, it's... valid... [P]eople discovered this... doing earthquake predictions... [T]he absolute risk... it's always low. They're very unpredictable... but telling people it's 10 times normal, or 100 times normal, people will act... appropriately. ...They won't panic. They won't rush away. ...[I]n Italy ...they ...sleep outside for a bit. ...So in certain circumstances relative risk can be very valuable... [U]sing both in... situations... with very small risks.., where... consequences are... severe... [and] the cost of the intervention, the action, is... minimal. Taking a bit more precautions, being a bit more careful... not putting a big investment into making a very small risk even smaller.... not walking under ladders... a low-cost change in your behavior to make a small risk even smaller... [A]bsolute risks really don't deal well with that, because you're talking 0.000..."

"By representing "home" — the place we go to be loved, nurtured and fed — has become a kind of symbolic mother to us all. She is also, of course, the symbolic mother that we feel we ought to be. Right through the last century, brides were given a "Mrs Beeton" on their wedding day as a to help them become the kind of woman that everyone, but especially their own mothers, expected. Young women setting off for married life in India, Australia or Canada were similarly presented with a "Mrs Beeton" by which it was hoped they would carry the mother culture far into places where previously only chaos and savagery — in other words, un-Englishness — had reigned. So there is a kind of pleasing logic to the fact that the original Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 was written to plug a gap where existing maternal relations had broken down. In the mid-19th century, middle-class women were, for the first time in history, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their native communities. Rapid urbanisation and the arrival of the railways meant that married life now involved setting up home sometimes hundreds of miles from the house where you were born. Where once you had been able to pop next door to ask mother's advice on a baby's cough or the best way to stone currants, now there was no one to consult. It was to fill this blind spot that a 21-year-old newly married woman, Isabella Beeton, decided to compile an encyclopaedia of domestic know-how, creating a paper and print version of Mother."

"Currently, there are few books that can help at school level with communication issues in statistics and DS. One exception is Spiegelhalter, a masterpiece in how to communicate easy, not-so-easy, hard, and very difficult topics in statistics. It uses real-world problem solving as a starting point for introducing statistical ideas. One reviewer of the book suggested “it should be compulsory reading for teachers and students of statistics (indeed all subjects that use or produce data), in schools, colleges and universities.” Although the Spiegelhalter book is a great example of communication, the paucity of material in this area shows that there is an urgent need to develop a pedagogy and a corresponding range of resources in writing and communicating statistics and DS."

"When it comes to trying to prevent you endangering other people, I don't see anything wrong with persuasion. ...[Y]ou shouldn't be... [endangering people] and you should be trying to be persuaded, if not forced... I get quite Stalinist on these things because... it's so irresponsible for some people to endanger the health of others. If they wanted to make their own decision that only affects them, it's very different, and I wouldn't want to persuade anyone..."

"When it comes to vaccines and infectious diseases, nobody is an individual... [With] [i]nfectious diseases... measles when it comes to vaccine decisions, or COVID-19 when it comes to taking precautions, we're not individuals. We are members of society, and there's no... "optimize your individual situation." You have... an absolute responsibility... to protect the people around you, particularly the vulnerable... [T]hat's why... people who avoid vaccinating their kids is outrageous and irresponsible... they are endangering weaker kids who might not be able to have the vaccines because their immune system is compromised or for some [other] reason... [S]imilarly, if young... healthy people... not... harmed by the virus, go around being irresponsible, they are endangering the lives of older people surrounding them, in particular, their own family."

"[I]n medicine... ... not manipulation or coercion, is when... as a doctor or... authority, you genuinely believe that this action is in the person's best interests, but they don't... want to do it. ...How do you make that an ethical persuasion? It's based on... two things, first... respecting the autonomy of the individuals, that they can refuse... no matter what, respect their ability to choose... the other thing is your authenticity, your integrity, that... you are doing this on behalf of that individual, for their best interest; not... to keep your clinic numbers up or to stop this person being a nuisance...[etc.]"

"[S]easonal flu—average year—kills 6,000 people in this country. Mainly old... vulnerable... frail...[etc.] So we are hit by this, year after year... epidemics... we've got to put this into perspective... [T]o an extent it is a trade-off between massive disruption... [I]f you say everyone has to stay in their home for 4 weeks... that's not just economic loss. It has a massive... health... [detriment] in terms of... mentality and fitness. Norsemen of harm will be done... so it's not just a matter of... "Minimize the number of deaths.""

"We know from studying and going... back to Geoffrey Rose's idea that the biggest impact on public health... is not by picking out the real high-risk people and maybe stopping them drinking. It's by reducing the exposure of the vast mass of people at intermediate risk. So... the biggest impact on public health would be if everybody drank a little bit less... But the problem... is the Rose paradox... the very people you want to change the behavior [of] are the ones who don't see why they should change their behavior, because the impact is minimal. They won't notice the benefits. You're asking them to give up something they enjoy for the benefit... they will... never notice... [I]t's only noticeable when... multiplied... ten million times./* Understanding Risk (Mar 24, 2020) */Ref: "a large number of people at a small risk may give rise to more cases of disease than the small number who are at"

"Communication is not a one-way process. It's not just telling people things. ...[T]he first rule of communication is to shut-up and... just listen... and good doctors will do that. ...Good doctors will listen and explore the person's values and concerns, and... explore to what extent... that person want[s] to be guided... to be told what to do... and that's... appropriate to want... guidance from a trusted source. ...And ...make sure ...before ...that stage, you have ...genuinely laid out the options in a way that gives it balance. You haven't tried to manipulate them... into a particular direction. ...Very difficult ...but ...a worthy objective, and... having done that, it's perfectly reasonable to... then, give advice."

"There is a way... which comes from economics and social science. It was developed by... Frank Knight, and Keynes used this... The distinction between risk and uncertainty... [R]isk is about things... we... understand... known unknowns, to use Donald Rumsfeld's... great phrase... [something] we can put numbers on, things within... circumscribed situations... A lot of medicine is like this... repetition, a lot of data. ...[I]nsurance is like this ...We know roughly what the chances are, and we can talk about the numbers. Uncertainty is when... we don't know the numbers, or... deeper... we don't even know... the problem... the options... the possible outcomes..."

"Misleading anecdote is someone smokes 20 a day and lives to 110, [or] who buys some tablets off the web and their cancer goes away... These are not representative... stories... [T]his is an active area of research, and it's been shown that if you present information in the way that Michael was presenting, as icon arrays, show both the good and the bad, show the totality, [it's been] shown empirically that you can make people less influenced by misleading anecdotes."

"[W]e tend to think... of something that's going to happen... soon, or is well understood as risk, but if we're talking about what will happen in the world in ten years time. Who's going to start putting chances on this. You'd be... deluded... There's much... deeper uncertainty or... radical uncertainty..."

"This current COVID-19 virus... is a classic situation... of... an uncertainty problem, rather than a risk problem because we... don't know the parameters. We don't know... how it might spread in Great Britain. We don't know the effectiveness of the interventions that are going to be made. So... when you're making projections... over the next 6 months, there's a massive range of possibilities, up to 1/2 million deaths... from about 5... the most optimistic... [A]ny quantification, giving any probabilities would be... very ambitious..."

"Psychologists got hold of this lovely idea of why we're trying to do it. I don't care what people do, so I'm not trying to change what they do, particularly. ...It would be nice if they could remember it... get the gist of something... learn something, but I don't even care too much about that. Psychologists have got this great scheme of what, perhaps, we're really trying to do, which is trying to breed some immunity to misleading anecdote, which is... the fact that we're so influenced by idiotic stories we hear on the web, or from our friends and neighbors."