Non Fiction Authors From England

"The has the distinction of being the smallest British bird; it is also one of the most widely distributed, being found throughout the United Kingdom. Furthermore, it is a resident throughout the year, is nowhere scarce, and in many places is very abundant. Yet it is well known only to those who are close observers of bird life. The gold crest is not a familiar figure, owing to its smallness and restlessness, which exceed that of all the other members of this restless family of birds, and make it difficult for the observer to see it well. Again, it is nearly always concealed from sight by the foliage, and in winter it keeps mostly among the evergreens, and at all times haunts by preference pine, fir, and yew trees. In the pale light of a winter day, more especially in cloudy weather, it is hard to see the greenish, restless little creature in his deep green bush or tree. Standing under, or close to, a wide-spreading old yew, half a dozen gold crests flitting incessantly about among the foliage in the gloomy interior of the trees look less like what they are than the small flitting shadows of birds."

"… A friend once confessed to me that he was always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of waters, which have no human associations. The feeling, so intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we may be but vaguely conscious."

"... the fruit-growers remind us in each recurring spring that it would be an immense advantage to the country if the village children were given one or two holidays each in March and April, and sent out to hunt and destroy s, every wasp brought in to be paid for by a bun at the public cost. That the wasp, an eater of ripe fruit, is also for six months every year a greedy devourer of caterpillars and flies injurious to plant live, is a fact the fruit-grower ignores."

"July 2nd 1902 DEAR GARNETT Thanks for writing—also for " envying " me. I'm in a cloud of by day in the woods, and the result is I smart and burn and tingle and itch all night. Are these the " delights " you would like to have! But I mix myself up in the private affairs of weasels, s, squirrels, s, s, s, s, &c. &c. and I get my pleasures that way and it more than compensates me for the pain. ..."

"… Trilobite expert, tiddlywinks player, mushroom hunter, poetry enthusiast and ardent lover of the museum, Fortey joined the staff of the paleontology department in 1970. He tells us that at the time he joined, the museum was so hierarchical that there were separate lavatories for “scientific officers” and “gentlemen.” (Both, however, were supplied with toilet paper that had “Government Property” stamped on each sheet.)"

"It was that did it for me. “Dr was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself.” The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the s of the . .. A book that starts with slimy things in the oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room."

"... Time piles rock upon rock. The sea comes and goes with the passing geological ages. Unless other events intervened, my trilobite would have become interred within an ever deeper pile of sediments, to a depth possibly beyond the deepest coal seam, and buried into an obscurity from which it would never emerge. But often in geology that which is buried is destined to rise. Phases of mountain building throw up rocks that were once deep beneath the surface. The British isles have been through no fewer than three such phases since my trilobite scuttled about on the sea floor. The first of these — the — was responsible for disinterring my fossil."

"… if you look back into history, the way the world has divided up into, say, linguistic groups, cultural groups, is ultimately under the control of geology. So, for example, think of the differences between the peoples north and south of the Himalayas. It’s extremely hard for people to cross – even the individual valleys within the Himalayas have cultural differences. Their history has been controlled to a large extent by those barriers. That’s a great control. But even on a small scale, the way cities looked – you know, the kind of cities that could be built – was controlled by the rocks that underlay it. For example, you could build tower blocks in New York because you had that nice, firm metamorphic rock to drive your piles down into. And the particular building stones are what have given, well, let’s say the majority of French cities and towns their own peculiar and interesting flavor. So geology controls the character of the world to a large extent."

"The public galleries take up much less than half of the space of the Natural History Museum. Tucked away, mostly out of view, there is a warren of corridors, obsolete galleries, offices, libraries and above all, collections. This is the natural habitat of the curator. It is where I have spent a large part of my life—indeed, the Natural History Museum provides a way of life as distinctive as that of a monastery. Most people in the world at large know very little about this unique habitat. This is the world I shall reveal."

"Collecting a pile of fossils is only the beginning. Many fossils are only fragments of the whole animal or plant. To piece together the whole organism is rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the complete picture to work towards. Piece has to be added to piece, and the larger and more fragmentary the animal the more the result is in question. Not surprisingly mistakes have been made. The first reconstruction of the dinosaur Iguanodon finished up with its thumb on its nose!"

"as quoted by Zoe Perzo,"

"Rundell spent her formative years in wild spaces. At age 7, she moved to Zimbabwe, where her mother had family and her father worked as a diplomat, paying the young Rundell 50 pence for every poem she memorized (and extra if it came from the Renaissance)."

"The trilobites, of course, overall have a fantastic variety of morphologies — fantastic variety of shapes. So you would expect them to have many different sorts of life habits."

"She is best known as the author of prizewinning children’s books (her only book for grown-ups, until now, is the slim and slyly titled “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise”). While she keeps one foot in the academic world as a fellow of , she has the other planted elsewhere, engaging in and — as good a preparation as any for rendering Donne’s precarious life."

"… I write about s, because it was probably a hermit crab who ate . And I write about s, because there was once a ."

"... Spending hours in libraries, reading old Latin manuscripts and the many brilliant encyclopaedias of mythical creatures: there are few things more wonderful."

"One lies upturned on the sand. Its tail sake waggles feebly, quite unable to perform the task of turning the body back over again. Five paris of legs twitch ineffectually in a vain attempt to achieve the same end. I find it impossible to resist the temptation to right the poor animal. It is easy to grasp it by the edges of the head-shield. Once righted again those spindly legs allow the crab to trundle slowly away. Its behaviour seem at once strangely determined, but also apparently random, like the slow progress of a confused old lady on a ."

"I ought to introduce you to trilobites ... fossil arthropods distantly related to the s and s of today, but very distantly related — enormously diverse in the ... rocks ... with an evolutionary history of their own of several hundred millions of years ..."

"... I think stories of transformations, of wild glories and everyday glories, of magic both real and imaginary, can act like a map. They give us a push toward hope. Real true hope isn't the promise that everything will be all right — but it's a belief that the world has so many strangenesses and possibilities that giving up would be a mistake; that we live in a universe shot through with the unexpected. There's never been a single decade in human history when we have not taken ourselves by surprise: we, the ungainly, wonky-toothed human species, have an endless potential for change. I am not an optimist, or a pessimist; I am a possibilityist. The possibilities out there for discovery, for knowledge, for transforming the world, are literally — there are spectacular ideas that we will have in the next ten years that we can't even begin to dream of now."

"Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to s. Today there is a whole library of richly illustrated guides and scholarly works on mushrooms. The fungus foray is a popular activity offered for public participation up and down the country. Yet when Fortey did it there were no teachers and the only widely available book was The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. It covered 200 of the many thousands of British species. Fungi, in short, are difficult. The author tells us he remains an amateur enthusiast, but it is a mark of his ability that he describes how, in 2006, he found a tiny fungus Ceriporiopsis herbicola new to science. The discovery of entirely unknown organisms happens to few, but it happens in Britain to almost none. You realise that a challenge in this funny and entertaining book is peeling back the curtain of the author’s self-deprecation."

"I come from a family of pilots. Both my grandfathers flew s in the Second World War, and my uncle can fly a plane. And, so, about five years ago, I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it."

"In 2011, after retiring from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, and following a windfall from presenting a TV series, Fortey purchased four acres of prime and wood. Located in the , a mile from his hometown of , Grim’s Dyke Wood is the very patch that had Mill so enraptured two centuries ago. Though it has changed in the intervening years, it is still a glorious spot – Fortey’s initial intention was to use the wood as a way to “escape into the open air”, to record a rich ecology of living wildlife following a career locked away in dusty museums studying dead things. He soon realised, however, that any portrait of the place would be incomplete without its human histories, too."

"I have been in love, and in debt, and in drink, This many and many a year."

"Come, blessed peace, we once again implore, And let our pains be less, or power more."

"And as we talked, there gathered at the gate People, as me thought, of very poor estate, With bag and staff, both crooked, lame and blind, Scabby and scurvy, pock-eaten flesh and rind, Lousy and scald, and pillèd like as apes, With scantly a rag for to cover their shapes, Breechless, bare-footed, all stinking with dirt, With a thousand of tatters drabbling to the skirt, Boyes, girles, and luskish strong knaves, Diddering and daddering, leaning on their staves."

"The difficulty of understanding why it should have been the Hindus who took this step, why it was not taken by the mathematicians of antiquity, why it should first have been taken by practical man, is only insuperable if we seek for the explanation of intellectual progress in the genius of a few gifted individuals, instead of in the whole social framework of custom thought which circumscribes the greatest individual genius. What happened in India about AD 100 had happened before. May be it is happening now in Soviet Russia…. To accept it (this truth) is to recognise that every culture contains within itself its own doom, unless it pays as much attention to the education of the mass of mankind as to the education of the exceptionally gifted people.’"

"In the whole history of Mathematics, there has been no more revolutionary step than the one which the Indian made when they invented the sign ‘0’ for the empty column of the counting frame."

"The travel writer Sara Wheeler prefers to travel alone. If she didn’t, you’d instantly volunteer to be her travelling companion. She’s an absolute hoot. But also deadly serious, fabulously well-read, thoughtful, self-deprecating – everything you’d want while slowly crossing some vast continent by bus or by train."

"Palmam qui meruit, ferat."

"This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly."

"To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery."

"Churton Collins ... was certainly not the man to grow enthusiastic over every " new thing " that might might loom above the literary horizon. He more often confronted novelty from the peak of than of . Yet it was Churton Collins who alligned with Dante and Milton, and declared that " no poet has made his début with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.""

"I am very much a generalist as opposed to a specialist. It's rather unfashionable, but I feel someone's got to be one. So every book is a new departure."

"‘The change did not come about without obstruction from the representatives of custom thought. An edict of A.D. 1259 forbade the bankers of Florence to use the infidel symbols, and the ecclesiastical authorities of the University of Padua in A.D. 1348 ordered that the price list of books should be prepared not in “ciphers”, but in plain letters.’"

"... One scholar says Tolstoy tells us to give away our money; Dostoevsky tells us to go to church; Chekhov says "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do"; Gogol says "To hell with it." But they all deal with a fumbling search for certainties with which we all engage. And they are failures in one sense or another, as we all are."

"... The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of , and s are its poster boys."

"If all the good people were clever, And all clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could.But somehow, ’tis seldom or never The two hit it off as they should; The good are so harsh to the clever, The clever so rude to the good!"

"... Throughout my writing life, travel has lent a vehicle in which to explore the inner terrain of fears and desires we stumble through every day. Writing about travel allowed flexibility and freedom within a rigid frame of train journeys, weather, and a knackered tent. The creative process is an escape from personality (T. S. Eliot said that), and so is the open road. And a journey goes in fits and starts, like life."

"What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect of the wind. The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (12 knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated."

"As time requireth, a man of marvellous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity, as who say: a man for all seasons."

"All the algorithms for fractions now used were invented by the Hindus. The Greek treatment of fractions never advanced beyond the level of the Egyptian Rhind papyrus. […] This inability to treat a fraction as a number on its own merits is the explanation of a practice [which] was as useless as it was ambiguous. […] When we remember that the Greeks and Alexandrians continued this extraordinary performance, there is nothing remarkable about the small progress which they achieved in their arithmetic. What is remarkable is that a few of them like Archimedes should have discovered anything at all about series of numbers involving fractional quantities."

"O passing beautiful—in this wild spot Temples, and tombs, and dwellings,—all forgot! One sea of sunlight far around them spread, And skies of sapphire mantling overhead. They seem no work of man’s creative hand, Where Labour wrought as wayward Fancy plann’d; But from the rock as if by magic grown, Eternal—silent—beautiful—alone! Not virgin white—like that old Doric shrine Where once Athena held her rites divine: Not saintly grey—like many a minster fane That crowns the hill, or sanctifies the plain: But rosy-red,—as if the blush of dawn Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn: The hues of youth upon a brow of woe, Which men call’d old two thousand years ago! Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime,— A rose-red city—‘half as old as Time!’"

"Either, with the best and wisest of all ages, you must believe the whole of Holy Scripture; or, with the narrow-minded infidel, you must disbelieve the whole. There is no middle course open to you."

"She was a gentlewoman, a scholar, and a saint, and after having been three times married, she took a vow of celibacy. What more could be expected of any woman?"

"Hot on Sunday, Cold on Monday, Hashed on Tuesday, Minced on Wednesday, Curried Thursday, Broth on Friday, Cottage pie Saturday."

"The fables of Witchcraft have taken so fast hold and deepe root in the heart of man, that fewe or none can (nowadaies) with patience indure the hand and correction of God."

"In Hallam's "Constitutional History of England," the good qualities of the antiquarian student are united with a masterly and impartial analysis of the growth of our political institutions, and set off by a classical grace of diction, and much power of exciting interest. The work is the only one of its kind and time, that combines, in a high degree, literary skill with valuable matter; and its merit is the greatest that can belong to an historical work, avowedly and designedly dissertative rather than narrative. The distinguished writer, (whose varied learning we shall yet meet on different ground,) conferred another standard work on our language, in his "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages.""

"If our witches' phantasies were not corrupted, nor their wits confounded with this humour, they would not so voluntarilie and readilie confesseth that which calleth their life into question."

"Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, in 4 vols. This is a production of the greatest value, and distinguished like his other work, for research, judgment, taste and elegance."

"The Revolution is not to be considered as a mere effort of the nation on a pressing emergency to rescue itself from the violence of a particular monarch; much less as grounded upon the danger of the Anglican church, its emoluments, and dignities, from the bigotry of a hostile religion. It was rather the triumph of those principles which, in the language of the present day, are denominated liberal or constitutional, over those of absolute monarchy, or of monarchy not effectually controlled by stated boundaries. It was the termination of a contest between the regal power and that of parliament, which could not have been brought to so favourable an issue by any other means."