Non Fiction Authors From England

"It is no longer possible to conceive of any organism—humans included—as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with."

"The success of this approach depends on the ecological fit. Poorly matched mycorrhizal species might do more harm to plants than good. Worse, introducing opportunistic fungal species to new environments might displace local fungal strains with unknown ecological consequences. It is a fact not always taken into account by the fast-growing industry of commercial mycorrhizal products, often marketed as one-size-fits-all quick fixes. As in the ballooning market for human probiotics, many of the microbial strains sold are selected not because they are particularly suitable but because they are easy to produce in manufacturing facilities."

"The more of their surroundings that hyphae can touch, the more they can consume. The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food."

"... are a , which is as broad a category of animals or plants. But they are a kingdom of life which has not had a kingdom's worth of attention."

"The impact of fungal diseases is increasing across the world: Unsustainable agricultural practices reduce the ability of plants to form relationships with the beneficial fungi on which they depend. The widespread use of antifungal chemicals has led to an unprecedented rise in new fungal superbugs that threaten both human and plant health."

"Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look."

"The perfection of an art consists in the employment of a comprehensive system of laws, commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but concealed from the eye of the spectator; and in the production of effects that seem to flow forth spontaneously, as though uncontrolled by their influence, and which are equally excellent, whether regarded individually, or in reference to the proposed result."

"While the language of the lips is fleeting as the breath itself, and confined to a single spot as well as to a single moment, the language of the pen enjoys, in many instances, an adamantine existence, and will only perish amid the ruins of the globe. Before its mighty touch time and space become annihilated; it joins epoch to epoch, and pole to pole.[…] But for this, everything would be doubt, and darkness, and death-shade; all knowledge would be traditionary and all experience local; civilized life would relapse into barbarism, and man would have to run through his little, and comparatively insignificant round of existence, the perpetual sport of ignorance and error, uninstructed by science, unregulated by laws, and unconsoled by Revelation."

"Now, happiness consists in activity: such is the constitution of our nature: it is a running stream and not a stagnant pool."

"Not worlds on worlds in phalanx deep, Need we to prove a God is here; The Daisy, fresh from Winter's sleep, Tells of his hand in lines as clear."

"Taste is that faculty which selects and relishes such combinations of ideas as produce genuine beauty, and rejects the contrary."

"Being ‘Ukrainian’, for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian."

"“One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva: 28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.”"

"“The ‘real’ Ukraine, the Ukraine that has outlived armies and ideologies, lies in the countryside. Half an hour’s drive out of the city one enters a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights. The people here live off their own pigs and cows, fruit-trees and hives; they drink themselves to death on home-brewed vodka, roll cigarettes out of old newspapers, and curse ‘American spaceships’ for dropping Colorado beetles on the potato-plants.”"

"As during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Maidan protests, which came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine’s fierce self-defense today is a defense of values, not of ethnic identity or of some imagined glorious past."

"Ukraina is literally translated as “on the edge” or “borderland”, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th, between Russia and Austria through the 19th, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it had never been an independent state."

"Ukraine’s progress before the invasion should not be overstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind the scenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasive corruption. (Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico and Zambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.)"

"But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves."

"Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia.'"

"In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovych’s flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actions had the opposite effect."

"A protest camp on Kyiv’s central square, known as the Maidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January 2014, the police began a violent crackdown, which climaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 police officers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of his luxurious private compound—Hermès dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lion—went on display in Ukraine’s National Art Museum."

"Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomor—literally, “killing by hunger”—a program of forced deportations and food and land requisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation of Ukraine’s rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraine’s urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that this extraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Soviet authorities knew that villagers were dying in great numbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning and forbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns."

"...a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled western part of the country—the first time Russia had ever controlled this territory. Two years later, however, the Wehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrested the Lviv intelligentsia—a rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—as they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed."

"The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one they are magnificently disproving on the battlefield."

"For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis..No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too."

"“What does Ukraine look like?” In the allotted five minutes I tried to give an idea...it’s green and gently rolling, and dotted with medieval fortresses, romantically neglected baroque palaces and monasteries, and quiet, pretty towns and little cities, much like those of Austria or the Czech Republic. Kyiv itself is a grand Belle Époque metropolis with up-and-down cobbled streets and chestnut trees. There are funny little back alleys and courtyards full of coffee shops and art galleries, leafy parks with views over the sprawling river Dnipro, and an array of glorious churches, the grandest of them the 11th-century Saint Sophia Cathedral."

"Saying that Ukraine doesn’t really exist is as absurd as saying that Ireland doesn’t exist because it was long under British rule, or that Norwegians are really Swedes."

"The two hinge moments of Ukraine’s post–Cold War history were two highly effective and genuinely inspirational displays of people power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into the Ukrainian presidency, an effort that seems to have included having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived the attack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantly falsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets in protest and stayed there until the electoral commission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution, were a plot orchestrated by the West."

"In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency, after the pro-European bloc rancorously split. For the next four years, he devoted himself to looting the Ukrainian treasury. But in November 2013, he went a step too far: just as Ukraine was about to ink a long-planned and widely popular trade deal with the European Union, he abruptly canceled it and, under pressure from Putin, announced a partnership with Russia instead."

"World investment will be made in the production of fulfilled human lives. The wealth of the community will be assessed by the number of human beings it embraces who are qualified to carry on and to improve... the development and the exchange of knowledge, art and science between all peoples. Nations, communities... will be valued only by this criterion — their contribution to the whole, not to their environment alone but to mankind."

"It will be discovered that a system of exchange between peoples of goods and services will, when intelligently developed, gradually cancel out the need for buying and selling with money."

"Economics will have ceased to be mainly connected with finance in peoples’ minds, because all that concerns finance now will have undergone such radical changes that the word itself will no longer have the same meaning. Finance, as we have known it, established a false set of values in the public mind. It was concerned with money and the things that could be bought with money. Money has been considered to be the first thing of value, or the thing that embodied all value in the world. It will later be realized that the thing of value on this earth is the human being, in so far as he is fit and fully developed."

"It will be realized that the first need from the economic viewpoint, is that every nation and community shall be as self-supporting as possible; the second need is that there shall be no unemployment anywhere. It should be the duty of each nation, therefore, to discover and determine to what extent she can be self-supporting in the matter of food, without impoverishing her soil. This settled, she will secondly maintain full employment according to agreed standards, by the production of surplus goods or works of art for which she has especial genius or facilities."

"By this time... the living through and the acting out of spiritual or ethical principles would have begun to be an intrinsic part of people’s lives, and orthodoxy as we now know it would have ceased to exist. Religion would no longer be an ‘aspect’ of human living but the almost unconscious foundation of every activity."

"[People].. would have become aware of the purpose and presence of God in every part of creation and in themselves, to such an extent that they would be incapable of separating ‘religion’ from science, education or government. The integration would have become complete."

"Most countries will be able to produce a proportion of some products beyond their own needs. This surplus will be passed to a Central Surplus Pool, controlled by the Council for Economics, and there registered in credit to the donor. The donor nation shall state her needs, of things with which she is unable to supply herself, and these needs, contributed to the Pool by other donor nations, shall be passed on to her. Thus no money, as such, need enter into these import and export transactions at all."

"Money will come to be considered as crystallized power or spiritual energy, and therefore its manipulation will become a solemn responsibility, closely under the guidance of the Spiritual Council."

"These councils will eventually work in collaboration with each other so that their plans dovetail and cohere from the start, and no aspects of living are forgotten... in time a scientific formula for their organization will be discovered, and a pattern into which everything will fall in its natural place."

"Eventually the government of each nation will send representatives to the World Government... Each national government will contain its own subsidiary international council within its ranks, whose duty it will be to keep closely in touch with its counterpart in every nation, so that constructive planning, agreements on various problems, exchange of news of experiments and of progress, may be carried on all the time."

"At the future period of which we are writing it will be acknowledged that the foundation of Government and of life in all its aspects must be firmly based upon spiritual principles. Thus the whole of World Government would rest upon the ultimate guidance and influence of the Spiritual Cabinet. The utter necessity of putting the spiritual side of life first and of using it as the criterion of living will have been for generations accepted by the people. They will have come to look first for this qualification in any man whom they wish to nominate to a place of responsibility."

"Little by little...the embryonic World Government... will set up a series of Councils of experts to study the best means of working out the fundamental problems of human existence — those of economics, agriculture, industry, distribution of populations, application of scientific discoveries, water power, production and distribution of necessities, and the organization of an International Force for the maintenance of peace and order...."

"The stipulation that a community must first be as self-supporting as possible in regard to food will do away with large scale cultivation of any one article, such as sugar, by a population who, living in a small area, must therefore depend upon obtaining much of their food from abroad."

"There will be tremendous difficulties to surmount whilst trying to arrive at the coming stages..."

"All this will happen more easily and quickly than seems possible today, firstly because it is an inescapable step in the natural process of human evolution; secondly because humanity itself by its earnest aspiration and patient blind endeavour and endurance, has struggled out of the ancient egotistic separatist attitude, and cast aside the fetters of conventional thought, and is beginning to offer an open mind and heart for the impress of new values and inspirations; thirdly, because the initial steps in world organization which arc about to be achieved by such bodies as the World Health Organization, the U.N. Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Economic and Social Council etc., will soon show up the stupendous possibilities lying ahead."

"The Spiritual Cabinet would be composed of ... [people] who stand highest in spiritual training and quality amongst a considerable rank of such. Some of these... would be drawn from the leaders of the great religions, but not all... the Spiritual Cabinet should not govern. Rather, by a life of aspiration and meditation should they offer themselves as a channel through which the Will and Love of God can be interpreted. They should consciously act as a link between the Divine Mind and mankind, between the Hierarchy of God’s unseen helpers and planners, and those who wish to serve them in the administration of human affairs. Their problem would be to translate the sensed Plan for mankind into terms applicable to the particular situation which is being dealt with."

"Can we grasp that there is more than enough land surface, capable of restoration, to support and feed in comfort a larger population than now exists on this globe?"

"Can we grasp that the only requirement in order that this may be so is organization, a combined world organization founded upon the spiritual principle of sharing and cooperation; and that this would change the world from the state it is now in to a comparative Heaven?"

"Can we grasp, for instance, that in spite of weather vagaries, even in spite of present soil erosion, there is and could be more than enough produced to-day to allow everyone everywhere a fair standard of living, without entailing drudgery for anybody?"

"Can we grasp also that not only have inventions up to date, which would have contrived this, been neglected or misused, but that just around the corner new inventions, such as the application of atomic energy, will, if they arc allowed, change and improve our lives out of all recognition?"

"Nations will for a long time insist upon a large measure of self-government, but when they begin to see the benefits which accrue from each successive international co-operative development, they will finally grasp the new principle of synthesis, and the age of separation will be over for ever."