Women Academics From England

"[B]eing at sea during the , when it arrived in the UK... back in 2013. I was on the in the North Atlantic and the swell... the during that storm was 10 meters during the middle of it."

"We know how that graph goes... Wind speed... along the x-axis, some measure of gas flux... along the y-axis, and we knew at the time that the graph only went so far to the right... [W]e were putting dots... on the graph that had not been there before... So there's that added thing of being there with the right equipment at the right time to... measure something that has not been measured directly before..."

"So after I finished my PhD I looked around for another topic, and I found bubbles... [T]hat... took me to Scripps, to the lab of Grant Deane and he... showed me the ocean... indirectly... I was in that lab. I had these experiments on bubbles. They involved things I understood, s and tanks and... s... [T]here was this frame by the door... and after three weeks they all started fussing around it, and I realized this thing, which I now know is just a surface following buoy, was their gateway to another world."

"The day they carried... [the surface following buoy] down to the beach... and I had never thought about what really might be underneath [the ocean]... [T]hen I understood the context for them and... became an ocean scientist by the back door. ...Then I had opportunities to go to sea and I continued the research..."

"I was indignant because I hadn't even read about it. ...I was that kid who had read every physics book, every science book, I'd read every copy of ' and whatever else... I was the... kid who had really read everything, and nobody had ever mentioned the ocean."

"Once I understood. Once I looked at the ocean differently... I was cross. Why had no on ever told me about this? Because this is clearly the biggest story on Earth!"

"[T]he called two or three... great series, '... but when did they actually say "What is the Blue?"... Not ever addressed."

"It's interesting how you can look at the sea and not see it. There's this phrase... that the Merchant Marine use, which is sea blindness... [T]he UK is especially guilty of this... We talk of ourselves as an island nation and we talk... of having this maritime history, and yet we never actually look at the sea... This idea that it can be right there and yet we're somehow blind to it... I was totally guilty of that... being sea blind."

"I've always studied the physics in the middle, even when I was doing my degree. ...I passed my exams in quantum mechanics and cosmology, but I knew I was never going to touch those things, but with the ocean it's something you can directly experience... I'm much more interested in the everyday world than in... s or something."

"It's very, very important to make the point that there are lots of ways to be an oceanographer. You don't have to go to sea... I would say to people, "I'm a physicist. I'm not an oceanographer." and they would go, "Oh you go to sea, so you're an oceanographer." But actually now we have much better data availability, data visualization... There are lots of people involved in coding and modeling and building devices and the engineering, who don't go to sea. But they are part of the ocean science community, and it's very, very important that they are there."

"[P]eople can contribute in lots of ways... [W]e're at the stage now, especially with any environmental science and... designing the future of society... where we... need all the help we can get... [S]o it is ludicrous to rule people out because they get seasick, for example. ...That's something of the past and... we have to move on from that."

"Alongside being a researcher for the past 10 or 12 years, I've also had the opportunity to make a lot of documentaries for the . ...This is not my first book. I've written science columns for years, for Focus magazine and '..."

"[T]he problem with the ocean... is that it's too many things to sum up in a sentence... [Y]ou can say logically what it is. It's a layer of water about this thick that covers 70% of Earth. Fine, it doesn't mean anything. But to convey to people what it means to have an ocean, what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet, you... need lots of different types of stories..."

"[T]he way I started to think about it... sometimes you get those kind of special effects where little pictures start appearing, making a , and then there's a shape left in the middle, and once you've got enough little pictures you can see the shape. But... until you've seen all those little pictures, you can't see anything. ...[T]he ocean's ...like that. The only way to really understand it, and we take this for granted as ocean scientists, is that you have to see it in lots of different ways. It's like the blind man and the elephant... One finds a trunk and thinks it's a snake. One finds a leg and thinks it's a tree. Yet you need all those perspectives, and then you start to build up a picture of what it means for an ocean to be there. ...[I]t ...bugged me that no one had done that and I thought I could find those stories."

"[E]ven the ocean scientists don't really know all the little stories, the places where it's mattered in history... [S]o I went looking for those."

"[T]hey came back with these two photos. One from , which was ', which was the Earth rising over the surface of the moon... before they'd landed on the moon, and the other on , the last of the Apollo missions, where they had the... full disk, the fully illuminated disk... '. ...That was when people started referring to the Earth as a "Blue Planet" because you couldn't look at that and not see that it was blue... [T]hen we spent 50 years not talking about the blue."

"So... The Blue Machine is the story of the ocean told through its messengers, passengers and voyages... [I]t's a mixture of natural history... human culture and human history... It's... a textbook dressed up as a bunch of stories."

"We would ask the BBC to explain why someone who defended the desecration of a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has been invited to speak on a programme about the rise of the Nazis. Given the outrage her comments have caused, the invitation by the programme makers seems both insensitive and provocative."

"We get well-funded public services, they get saved from the consequences of their own hubris. What's not to like?"

"If the super-rich can spend £250,000 on vanity jaunts 2.4 miles beneath the ocean then they’re not being taxed enough."

"The Titanic submarine is a modern morality tale of what happens when you have too much money, and the grotesque inequality of sympathy, attention and aid for those without it."

"I'm literally a communist, you idiot."

"Mama Sarkar didn't raise a diplomat."

"No ones saying that Jewish people don’t experience racism. That’s obviously true, especially online. But unlike me, you can *also* benefit from white privilege."

"I'm on Team Hate."

"[Asked what makes her tick?] Petty vengeance and hopefulness."

"The unfortunate truth is that, sometimes, the only thing that separates an anonymous troll and a journalist is a byline. Some of the worst abuse I’ve received is either from journalists or the direct consequence of their actions in spreading misinformation about me."

"The white British population has decreased by 600,000, while the minority population has increased by 1.2 million. So yes, lads, we're winning!"

"A country with a sense of purpose should encourage free speech and debate, but instead we have a Conservative whip on a strange mission to audit university teaching on Brexit. Pretty McCarthyite. And on the other side, confusion about who should and shouldn't be allowed to speak. We should nurture great minds of the future, not tunnel their vision."

"Large families were really in fashion [in Victorian England], they were seen as a status symbol, they were seen as an example of how the man was very virile. The reality was that, like Victoria, people were pregnant repeatedly. Every three months or so they might fall pregnant, so the average woman was pretty much pregnant or about to be pregnant for most of her early married life."

"We have some of the greatest photographs of all time cemented in our [the United Kingdom's] national identity, but we don't have the whole picture. Our understanding of history and the country is shaped by the images the survive."

"History is so important. It explores and tells us who we are. We should be doing more of it as a country, not less."

"In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other."

"I've heard people say, ‘Well, history is protected at the top Russell Group universities’. But that is a really dangerous route to go down. Are we saying that if people don’t get 3As, they don’t deserve to do history? It should be a degree that is open to all, and that means it must be available to those who want to study locally. Otherwise we might as well be going back to the Victorian period when this sort of university education was only for elite men."

"I actually wanted to be an astronaut more than an astronomer for a quite a long time. Then I learned this would require I somehow become a US citizen (at the time Brits could not be ESA Astronauts because of the UK’s refusal to fund the human spaceflight part of ESA – although this has recently changed), and I also discovered how much detail I would be required to know about the space shuttle and just how fit I would have to be. I’m not really a detail oriented person, and I’m not that keen on the gym, so I gently switched my goal to becoming an astronomer! This also has the advantage of letting me keep my feet on the ground!"

"[After reaching no. 7 in the best-seller lists] But a certain JK Rowling came along and you're never going to beat that. And there's always been one or two others much better than me. [Better or bigger?] Bigger! [laughs] Occasionally better."

"My mum would have loved Shirley Temple as a daughter – full of confidence, tap-dancing all over the place in flouncy clothes, and showing off. [She had] A girl sitting there reading a book, looking gormless."

"I’ve tried hard…I don't know … my experience of my own dad and my own ex-husband possibly has some effect. I will remedy this. It is very unfair. I have tried harder, but I just can't quite get there yet."

"[Her mother stopped her daughter from wearing any jewelry. Wilson refers to a large rose quartz ring on her finger] I mean, isn't it pathetic when, even in your 70s, you wear things that a psychiatrist would point out is rebelling against your mother?"

"I can't think of a book where there's a woman born into a working-class background, who in her 70s is living a very comfortable, upper-middle-class sort of life; a woman who married at 19, had a baby at 21, was a policeman's wife for years, but whose marriage broke up in late middle age and who became very well known for a time. She then met a woman and became very happy with her. There isn't one!"

"It is strange…that sometimes people assume the worst of children if they come from poor families. I remember being astonished when I took my daughter to a party given by her schoolfriend’s parents. They lived in a lovely, big house very near the block of council flats where I grew up. The mother was very friendly to me, and said how pleased she was that our daughters were friends because obviously she could have nothing to do with ‘those dreadful scary rough children from the council flats’. I didn’t want to embarrass her by saying that I had once been one of those very children."

"I don't think that girls would ever have wanted a grey-haired, wrinkly writer as a role model if they were wanting to feel good about maybe being gay…I'm sure they could find much more glamorous examples."

"[Referring to Trish, her civil partner] I asked her about earlier girlfriends and she said she'd never had a year-after-year relationship, and I thought: "Right, I'm going to be that." And I have been, so far."

"Folks, we are getting just plain sick and tired of this drumbeat of lies, misdirection and smug condescension by Washington payrollers like Fiona Hill. No Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election? Exactly what hay wagon does she think we fell off from?"

"Likewise, his (President Trump's) boss on the National Security Council Staff, Fiona Hill, sounded more like she had just stepped out of the 1950s with her heated Cold War rhetoric... And who gets to decide US foreign policy objectives in Europe? Not the US President, according to government bureaucrat Fiona Hill... Who was Fiona Hill’s boss? Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who no doubt agreed that the president has no right to change US foreign policy."

"This time it was Dr. Fiona Hill who sanctimoniously advised the House committee that there is nothing to see on the Ukraine front that involved any legitimate matter of state; it was just the Donald and his tinfoil hat chums jeopardizing the serious business of protecting the national security by injecting electioneering into relations with Ukraine."

"If U.S. Attorney John Durham is allowed to do his job probing the origins of Russiagate, and succeeds in getting access to the “handpicked analysts” — whether there were just two, or more — Hill’s faith in “our intelligence agencies,” may well be dented if not altogether shattered."

"Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock — as we used to say of smart know-nothings ... A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) “Intelligence Community Assessment” published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the “mainstream” media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton’s defeat on the Russians."

"On Thursday Fiona Hill, the former White House Russia expert, was all business, a serious woman you don’t want to mess with. She reoriented things, warning that those who excuse or don’t wish to see Russian propaganda efforts against America, and targeting its elections, are missing the obvious. The suspicion of the president and his allies that Ukraine is the great culprit in the 2016 election is a "fictional narrative." They are, in fact, bowing to disinformation Russia spreads to cover its tracks and confuse the American people and its political class. She dismissed the president’s operatives' efforts to get Ukraine’s new president to investigate his country’s alleged meddling as a "domestic political errand." She and other diplomats were "involved in national security, foreign policy," and the interests of the operatives and the diplomats had "diverged." She warned Mr. Sondland: "This is all going to blow up.""

"Yet Fiona Hill sat before a House committee and under oath insisted that all of the above was a Trumpian conspiracy theory, thereby reminding us that the neocon Russophobes are so unhinged that they are prepared to lie at the drop of a hat to keep their false narrative about the Russian Threat and Putin’s “invasion” of Ukraine alive. Needless to say, Fiona Hill is among the worst of the neocon warmongers, and has made a specialty of demonizing Russia and propagating over and over flat out lies about what happened in Kiev during 2014 and after."