Cambridge English Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Cambridge English. Here they are! All 53 of them:

There is little scientific data on the point, but evidently people do speak to themselves.
David Crystal (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language)
I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths - and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike. Later I became I writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.
Douglas Adams
After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash.
Samantha Ellis (How to Be a Heroine)
I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.
Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August: An Indian Story)
Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.
A.S. Byatt (Possession)
What suckling craved the creature, born full-fanged?
Aeschylus (The Oresteia of Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides. The Greek text as arranged for performance at Cambridge with an English verse translation)
But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being.
Ian McEwan (Atonement)
I went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths—and a degree in English.
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1-5))
This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it. Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do? In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work. We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and st back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.
Douglas Adams
Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s Director of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him at all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three years here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a beard and pretending to be someone else.
Douglas Adams
Woolf ’s control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed. It was responsible, for example, for the first major works of Freud in English, beginning in 1922, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Woolf herself set the type for the Hogarth edition of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), which he read to them in June 1922, and which she found to have ‘great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure’ (D2 178).
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
The girls thought the altar and the candles and the Mass very cute; one of them had been sometimes to that kind of service in Cambridge, Mass., at a place she called the Monastery, which Father Chantry-Pigg said was where the Cowley Fathers in America lived, but the other girl and her parents were not Episcopalian, they belonged to one of those sects that Americans have, and that are difficult for English people to grasp, though probably they got over from Britain in the Mayflower originally, and when sects arrive in America they multiply, like rabbits in Australia, so that America has about one hundred to each one in Britain, and this is said to be in on account of the encouraging climate, which is different in each of the states, and most encouraging of all in the Deep South and in California, where sects breed best.
Rose Macaulay (The Towers of Trebizond)
The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. Indeed, by the end of the fourteenth century the educated language of London, bolstered by the economic power of London itself, was beginning to become the standard form of written language throughout the country, although the process was not to be completed for several centuries. The cultural, commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands (one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of the dialect.
Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–94). Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story ‘Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ (1928). Thoby boarded at Clifton College, Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope’s School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts (attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while). From 1902 Virginia’s tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964), Lytton Strachey (1880– 1932), Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Saxon Sydney-Turner.
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
In its modern form, football comes from a gentleman’s agreement signed by twelve English clubs in the autumn of 1863 in a London tavern. The clubs agreed to abide by rules established in 1848 at the University of Cambridge. In Cambridge football divorced rugby: carrying the ball with your hands was outlawed, although touching it was allowed, and kicking the adversary was also prohibited. ‘Kicks must be aimed only at the ball,’ warned one rule. A century and a half later some players still confuse the ball with their rival’s skull owing to the similarity in shape.
Eduardo Galeano (Football in Sun and Shadow (Penguin Modern Classics))
Now, then,” Brichot went on, “bec in Norman is ‘stream’; there is the Abbey of Bec; Mobec, the stream of the marshland (mor or mer meant ‘marsh,’ as in Morville, or in Bricquemar, Alvimare, Cambremer); Briquebec, the stream of the height, coming from briga, a fortified place, as in Bricqueville, Bricquebosc, Le Bric, Briand, or else from brice, a bridge, which is the same as Bruck in German (Innsbruck) and in English bridge, which ends so many place-names (Cambridge, etc.). You have a lot of other becs in Normandy: Caudebec, Bolbec, Le Robec, Le Bec—Hellouin, Becquerel. It’s the Norman form of the Germanic Bach, Offenbach, Anspach. Varaguebec, from the old word varaigne, the equivalent of garenne, a private wood or pond.
Marcel Proust (Sodom and Gomorrah)
can …’ As I listened, I looked up at the white clouds drifting past. Finally, they had opened – it had started to snow – snowflakes were falling outside. I opened the window and reached out my hand. I caught a snowflake. I watched it disappear, vanish from my fingertip. I smiled. And I went to catch another one. Acknowledgements I’m hugely indebted to my agent, Sam Copeland, for making all this happen. And I’m especially grateful to my editors – Ben Willis in the United Kingdom and Ryan Doherty in the United States – for making the book so much better. I also want to thank Hal Jensen and Ivàn Fernandez Soto for their invaluable comments; Kate White for years of showing me how good therapy works; the young people and staff at Northgate and everything they taught me; Diane Medak for letting me use her house as a writing retreat; Uma Thurman and James Haslam for making me a better writer. And for all their helpful suggestions, and encouragement, Emily Holt, Victoria Holt, Vanessa Holt, Nedie Antoniades, and Joe Adams. Author Biography Alex Michaelides read English at Cambridge University and screenwriting at the American Film Institute. He wrote the film Devil You Know starring Rosamund Pike, and co-wrote The Con is On. His debut novel, The Silent Patient, is also being developed into a major motion picture, and has been sold in thirty-nine territories worldwide. Born in Cyprus to a Greek-Cypriot father and English mother, Michaelides now lives in London, England.
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
They were brought up that way by their parents. When they came to England, they were further mesmerised. They were impressed by English language, literature and English way of life. They considered the English as divine. Let us consider a specific case. The person is not a modern Hindu but a Muslim. His name is Sayyad Ahmad. He founded the Aligad Movement and asked Muslims to be slaves of the English forever. When he lived in England in late nineteenth century he wrote a letter to his friends describing life in England at that time. In a letter of 1869 he wrote – “The English have reasons to believe that we in India are imbecile brutes. What I have seen and daily seeing is utterly beyond imagination of a native in India. All good things, spiritual and worldly which should be found in man have been bestowed by the Almighty on Europe and especially on the English.” (Ref -Nehru’s Autobiography page 461). Above letter of Sayyad Ahmad would suffice to show how mentally degenerated and devoid of any self-respect, Indians had become. I have already illustrated this point by quoting experiences of Indians from the early days of Dadabhai Naoroji till I reached London in 1906. Gandhi came to London to study Law in 1888. His behaviour was no different to that described above. He too tried to use Top Hat, Tail Coat and expensive ties. Many other Indians have described their experiences in a similar manner. Motilal Nehru, like father of Arvind Ghosh too, was impressed by the British Raj. He sent his son Jawaharlal to England in his young age, who stayed in English hostels and so anglicised he had become that after studying in Cambridge University and becoming a Barrister in 1912 he paid no attention to Indian Politics which was taking shape in Europe. Anyone can verify my statements by referring to autobiographies of Gandhi, Nehru, Charudatta, and others. When the British called Indians as Brutes, instead of becoming furious, Indians would react – “Oh yes sir. We are indeed so and that is why, by divine dispensation, the British Raj has been established over us.“ I was trying to sow seeds of armed revolution to overthrow the British rule in India. The readers can imagine how difficult, well nigh impossible was my task. I was determined .
Anonymous
The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
Here is a checklist for helping your students maintain and boost their motivation. Relate each item to the key motivators of agency (A), relatedness (R) and competence (C). Some items may be a mixture of more than one motivator. 1 Encourage students to get to know each other and talk to each other about their lives and what matters to them. Join in yourself. 2 Suggest they keep a learning journal in which they reflect on what they have learnt,  what activities they have liked or disliked, what is affecting their learning. 3 Allow class time for them to report on their learning to a partner or in small groups 4 Exploit the motivational tools that accompany course books, such as progress tests, ‘can do’ self-evaluative checklists and CEF-based portfolios. There is more on this in the section on coaching with a course book. 5 Wherever possible give your students a choice of what they do in class and for homework (whatever their age!), either as a group by voting for one activity which everyone will do or allowing them individually to choose different activities. 6 Help students set goals for themselves, as a group and individually. Encourage them to write these down and check their progress. 7 Offer your students the opportunity to prepare for an external exam which relates to their needs, such as the Trinity GESE exams for spoken English or the Cambridge ESOL exams. 8 Ask your students how they are feeling about their English on a regular basis. Ask them where their motivation levels are from one week to the next. Get them to ask each other. Be a role model by paying attention to your own motivation!
Daniel Barber (From English Teacher to Learner Coach)
Yet for all his idiosyncrasies in writing for the stage, Vaughan Williams did create several works of great power and beauty. Given the degree to which he refused to compromise his artistic vision, and the long odds most English composers of his generation faced in having their stage works realized – not to mention the lack of encouragement from the English musical world in general – the fact that he met with any success at all is remarkable.
Alain Frogley (The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge Companions to Music))
But it is the personal synthesis of elements taken from a wide variety of historical styles and periods that most strongly links the church music with Vaughan Williams’s output as a whole. This can be observed anywhere but is perhaps best illustrated by the Mass, a work whose neo-Tudor associations have obscured awareness of a wider eclecticism. Techniques favoured by sixteenth-century English church musicians – false relations, fauxbourdon-like textures, contrasts between soloist(s) and the full choir – are indeed present, but they are combined with others – canon and points of imitation, sectional division of the text (articulated by textural contrasts), emphasis on the church modes – that were the lingua franca of the period, common to English and continental music alike. Even these Renaissance techniques are but a ‘starting-point’32 for what is clearly a highly personal essay, however.
Alain Frogley (The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge Companions to Music))
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION P. 19 The unusual antiquity and reliability of the earliest surviving manuscripts at Leningrad and Cambridge and the surprisingly large number of medieval manuscripts
Bede (Ecclesiastical History of the English People: with Bede's Letter to Egbert and Cuthbert's Letter on the Death of Bede)
The student with whom Hal shared a bedroom, Englishman John Abel Smith, bore educational credentials that Hal could only dimly conceive. John was the namesake of a renowned merchant banker and British Member of Parliament. He had attended Eton, one of the world’s most famous preparatory schools, before entering Cambridge, where he had “read” under the personal tutelage of English scholars. Hal began to understand the difference between his public-school education and the background of his roommates when he surveyed them relative to a reading list he came across. It was titled, “One Hundred Books Every Educated Person Ought to Have Read.” George Montgomery and Powell Cabot had read approximately seventy and eighty, respectively. John Abel Smith had read all but four. Hal had read (though not necessarily finished) six. Hal also felt his social inferiority. He had long known that his parents weren’t fashionable. His mother never had her hair done in a beauty parlor. His father owned only one pair of dress shoes at a time and frequently took long trips abroad with nothing but his briefcase and a single change of underwear, washing his clothes—including a “wash-and-wear” suit—in hotel sinks at night. That was part of the reason why Hal took an expensive tailored suit—a broad-shouldered pinstripe—and a new fedora hat to Boston. He knew that he needed to rise to a new level, fashion-wise. But he realized that his fashion statement had failed when Powell Cabot asked, late in October, to borrow his suit and hat. Hal’s swell of pride turned to chagrin when Powell explained his purpose—he had been invited to a Halloween costume party, and he wanted to go as a gangster.
Robert I. Eaton (I Will Lead You Along: The Life of Henry B. Eyring)
I think you should be punished for tormenting me for so long.” --- “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Art is full of agony and beauty. The pen itself a sword of pleasure and pain, isn’t it, my poet?” --- “I’ve been waiting for you.” His voice sizzled with hunger. How could I respond? I’ve been thinking about you non-stop like a sex-crazed harlot since I left? “I’m here.” --- “Remind me who you are,” he said in a gentler tone, almost a please. “How we know each other.” “Okay,” she began. “I’m Savannah Evans, a grad student and teaching assistant who teaches English at a college in Cambridge. I applied to the colony to work on my poetry and arrived six weeks ago. “We’ve spoken many times. You’ve praised my work, which I find a great honor as I’m a fan of your art.” --- “A cross between two species. Doomed with the thirst of the undead for human blood, yet tormented by the gargoyle drive to protect them.” --- She ceased to breathe. When he leaned forward and his lips fluttered against hers, her footing became unsteady and she stumbled. He placed a hand on her lower back to steady her and pulled her close. Her breasts met his hard torso and she became aware at how frantically her heart beat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and lost herself in the kiss as their lips met. They explored each other with a sort of fascination, mouth and tongues claiming each other in their hunger. Delicately at first, as if not sure this was real or just a fantasy, and then strong and unyielding. Demanding this moment to never end. --- “I bought new lingerie today I wanted to show you, but I didn’t get a chance with all that happened.” “You’ll have to return tomorrow night then…. Maybe we’ll order an entire catalog.” His smile and the glint of mischievousness in his eyes reflected lascivious thoughts. “You can model all the outfits you’d like for me.” ---
Lisa Carlisle (Dark Velvet (Chateau Seductions, #1))
Remind me who you are,” he said in a gentler tone, almost a please. “How we know each other.” “Okay,” she began. “I’m Savannah Evans, a grad student and teaching assistant who teaches English at a college in Cambridge. I applied to the colony to work on my poetry and arrived six weeks ago. “We’ve spoken many times. You’ve praised my work, which I find a great honor as I’m a fan of your art.
Lisa Carlisle (Dark Velvet (Chateau Seductions, #1))
The six orthodox (Vedas-based) systems are Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta, Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Vaisesika. Readers of a scholarly bent will delight in the subtleties and broad scope of these ancient formulations as summarised in English in A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, by Prof. Surendranath Dasgupta (Cambridge Univ. Press.) 9
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Complete Edition))
English word “avarice,” which Cambridge Dictionary defines as “an extremely strong want to get or keep money or possessions”.
Domenic Marbaniang (Corruption: Roots, Challenges, Solutions)
Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent.
David Leavitt (While England Sleeps)
Whatever we did, we always talked mathematics,” Wiener explained. “Much of our talk led to no immediate research.” Wiener found that the Proving Ground “furnished a certain equivalent to that cloistered but enthusiastic intellectual life which I had previously experienced at the English Cambridge, but at no American university.” Veblen had gathered a community that would redefine American mathematics in the years between World War I and World War II. “For many years after the First World War,” wrote Wiener, “the overwhelming majority of significant American mathematicians was to be found among those who had gone through the discipline of the Proving Ground.
George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), who began his writing career in the 1860s. Henty – educated at Westminster and Caius, Cambridge, the son of a wealthy stockbroker – had been commissioned in the Purveyor’s Department of the army, and gone to the Crimea during the war. There he had drifted into journalism, sending back reports for the Morning Advertiser and the Morning Post before catching fever and being invalided home. He continued to work in the Purveyor’s Department until the mid-Sixties, when the life of the war correspondent and the writer of boys’ adventure stories seemed overwhelmingly more interesting and better paid. Four generations of British children grew up with Henry’s irresistible stories, beautifully produced, bound and edited, on their shelves. The Henty phenomenon – over seventy titles celebrating imperialistic derring-do – really belongs to the 1880s, but deserves a mention here not only because of his radical and political views, but because of the direction taken by his career as a writer. The Henty story, by the time he had got into his stride, followed the formula that a young English lad in his early teens, freed from the shackles of public school or home upbringing by the convenient accident of orphanhood, finds himself caught up in some thrilling historical episode. The temporal sweep is impressive, ranging from Beric at Agincourt to The Briton: a story of the Roman Invasion; but the huge majority are exercises in British imperialist myth-building: By Conduct and Courage, A Story of the Days of Nelson, By Pike and Dyke, By Sheer Pluck, A Tale of the Ashanti War, Condemned as a Nihilist, The Dash for Khartoum, For Name and Fame: or through the Afghan Passes, Jack Archer, A Tale of the Crimea, Through the Sikh War. A Tale of the Punjaub (sic); The Tiger of Mysore, With Buller in Natal, With Kitchener in the Soudan, and so on.
A.N. Wilson (The Victorians)
A communicative methodology will therefore encourage students to practise language in pairs and groups, where they have equal opportunity to ask, answer, initiate and respond. The teacher assumes a counselling role, initiating activity, listening, helping and advising. Students are encouraged to communicate effectively rather than merely to produce grammatically correct forms of English.
Scott Thornbury (Scott Thornbury's 30 Language Teaching Methods Kindle eBook: Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers)
In a vast open-plan office, notable for its astonishing quiet (in an hour and a half not a single telephone rings), the Oxford lexicographers try to keep track of how the language is changing. Desktop screens flash with messages from lookouts across the English-speaking world, bringing news of new coinings. An informant has contacted them to report what she thinks is the first sighting of the expression ‘bad hair day’. It turns out to have been in a newspaper in Seattle. A correspondent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has discovered a hitherto unknown early use of ‘Maltese’, predating anything in the dictionary. A subdued excitement follows.
Jeremy Paxman (The English: A Portrait of a People)
It takes some believing, but it was not until 1869 that Emily Davies founded Girton as a Cambridge college for women, and when, in 1896, the university came to vote on whether women should be allowed to face examinations for degrees, The Times printed train timetables, to enable London-based graduates to travel to Cambridge to vote against the proposition. The university did not allow women full membership until 1948.
Jeremy Paxman (The English: A Portrait of a People)
There was a posh girl in my year at Cambridge, also a philosopher, who gave names to every significant possession in her life. She had a teddy bear, of course, but her car had a name too. So did her phone. So did both of her laptops and her camera. For all I know, she gave names to her knives and forks as well - I don't know how far these things go with the English aristocracy.
Harry Bingham (Talking to the Dead (Fiona Griffiths, #1))
In the words of the Cambridge don Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s tutor, one should “speak as the common people do…think as wise men do.” Thomas
Robert Tombs (The English and Their History)
Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142. Set in Stone sans and Stone serif by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hippel, Eric von. Democratizing innovation / Eric von Hippel.
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
Trouble-strewn India was no longer a rich source of career opportunities for English graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, who for decades had taken Indian civil service exams, headed east on Peninsula & Orient steamers to make their fortunes in Bengal, and won fame fighting along India’s northwest frontier.
Stanley Wolpert (Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India)
There were continual, background regrets, which repeated on multiple pages. ‘I regret not staying in The Labyrinths, because I let down my brother.’ ‘I regret not staying in The Labyrinths, because I let down myself.’ ‘I regret not doing more for the environment.’ ‘I regret the time I spent on social media.’ ‘I regret not going to Australia with Izzy.’ ‘I regret not having more fun when I was younger.’ ‘I regret all those arguments with Dad.’ ‘I regret not working with animals.’ ‘I regret not doing Geology at University instead of Philosophy.’ ‘I regret not learning how to be a happier person.’ ‘I regret feeling so much guilt.’ ‘I regret not sticking at Spanish.’ ‘I regret not choosing science subjects in my A-levels.’ ‘I regret not becoming a glaciologist.’ ‘I regret not getting married.’ ‘I regret not applying to do a Master’s degree in Philosophy at Cambridge.’ ‘I regret not keeping healthy.’ ‘I regret moving to London.’ ‘I regret not going to Paris to teach English.’ ‘I regret not finishing the novel I started at university.’ ‘I regret moving out of London.’ ‘I regret having a job with no prospects.’ ‘I regret not being a better sister.’ ‘I regret not having a gap year after university.’ ‘I regret disappointing my father.’ ‘I regret that I teach piano more than I play it.’ ‘I regret my financial mismanagement.’ ‘I regret not living in the countryside.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
Hitler was head of the catchily-named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten Nationalsozialistische to Nazi. Why would they do this? Because Nazi was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years. Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius. This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks.
Mark Forsyth (The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language)
The āsanas of haṭha yoga were commonly, indeed routinely, compared with gymnastics in [early popular yoga] manuals. These interpretations of postural yoga were significantly divergent from those given by "classical" haṭha yoga texts, such as those translated by Vasu. Indeed, the whole somatic and philosophical framework of this new English-language yoga appeared to have been replaced by a modern discourse of health and fitness. An examination of the eighteenth- to early twentieth-century European gymnastics manuals in the British Library and Cambridge University Library showed without much doubt that anglophone yoga authors had grafted elements of modern physical culture onto haṭha yoga orthopraxy and seemingly excised those parts that were difficult to reconcile with the emerging health and fitness discourse.
Mark Singleton (Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice)
Every savage can dance,' declared Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. His antagonist's riposte now seems odd—'I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.' 'Science' is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using 'science' for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards, 'science' could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern scientific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demanding than chemistry, electricity, or geology. However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected 'philosopher', and William Whewell—one of Babbage's allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer—suggested 'scientist' instead. The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keeping older expressions, such as 'man of science', or 'naturalist', or 'experimental philosopher'. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century's most eminent scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused 'scientist' of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neologism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die 'than bestialize our tongue by such barbarisms'. The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that 'scientist' was fully accepted.
Patricia Fara
But here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have “the elderly.” The connotations are quite different. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary online, “elderly” is nothing more than “a polite word for ‘old.’” The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary informs us that “elderly” can also mean “old-fashioned.” In Lexico, the Oxford online thesaurus, the word is associated with synonyms such as “doddering,” “decrepit,” “in one’s dotage,” “past one’s prime,” “past it,” and “over the hill.” It doesn’t paint a pretty picture; these are not exactly the adjectives that most aging women would aspire to embody. But the aging woman has had a particularly troubled history in Western culture. The last convictions might have taken place in the eighteenth century, but in many ways we still haven’t quite recovered from our demonization in the witch trials. Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialized and marginalized, and often actively ridiculed. “Little old ladies,” we call them here in Britain; “old bats” (if we think they’re crazy), or “old bags” and “old trouts” (if they don’t live up to our expectations that old women should rarely be seen, and certainly should never be heard).
Sharon Blackie (Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life)
All right,’ he said. ’I solved the problem by taking a bed-sitting room near the British Museum. My father wanted me to study medicine, but it didn’t interest me enough to make a career of it. My mother on the other hand wanted me to go up to Cambridge and read English, which appealed to me slightly more. However, I decided not to take the path of formal education. It would have been too easy, that was my thinking. I should have been given a generous allowance and taken up my rightful place as a prospective member of the governing class. The idea repelled me.’ ‘But why?’ asked Lustgarten. They were still standing by the gate which was only partly open. ‘It’s difficult to explain. Everyone I know takes life for granted. Heidegger has a phrase which captures it entirely: the triviality of everydayness. It is as if they are forgetful of existence.’ Lustgarten was nodding his long head in great seriousness.
Gomery Kimber (The Nazi Alchemist (Wyvern #1))
like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity. Towering over Nicholas’s childhood was his father, Claude, a man of immovable Victorian principles and ferocious prejudices. Claude loathed music, which gave him indigestion, despised all forms of heating as “effete,” and believed that “when dealing with foreigners the best plan was to shout at them in English.” Before becoming headmaster of Eton, Claude Elliott had taught history at Cambridge University, despite an ingrained distrust of academics and an aversion to intellectual conversation. The long university vacations gave him plenty of time for mountain climbing. He might have
Ben Macintyre (A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal)
3Thou hast taken away all thy wrath: thou hast turned thyself from the fierceness of thine anger.
Oxford and Cambridge University Presses (English Revised Version (1885): Published by Kingdom Konnexion)
Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1919. Davies, Owen. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57. Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.
Katherine Howe (The Penguin Book of Witches)
Was this move to Cambridge wise? Some certainly doubted it. John Wain, one of Lewis’s former pupils, suggested that it was like “leaving an overblown and neglected rose-garden for a horticultural research station on the plains of Siberia.”[646] Wain’s meaning here was ideological, not meteorological. He was not thinking primarily of the icy east winds from the Urals that can make Cambridge so bitterly cold in winter, but of the clinically cool attitude towards literature that dominated the Cambridge English faculty at this time. Lewis was entering a lion’s den—a faculty which prized “critical theory” and treated texts as “objects” for analytical dissection, rather than for intellectual enjoyment and enlargement.
Alister E. McGrath (C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet)
Cambridge professor William Perkins rested at the cornerstone of British Puritanism in the late sixteenth century. “Though the servant in regard of faith and the inner man be equal to his master, in regard of the outward man . . . the master is above the servant,” he explained in Ordering a Familie, published in 1590. In paraphrasing St. Paul, Perkins became one of the first major English theorists—or assimilationist theologians, to be more precise—to mask the exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship. He thus added to Zurara’s justifying theory of Portuguese enslavers nurturing African beasts. For generations to come, assimilationist slaveholders, from Richard Mather’s New England to Hispaniola, would shrewdly use this loving-family mask to cover up the exploitation and brutality of slavery. It was Perkins’s family ordering that Puritan leaders like John Cotton and Richard Mather used to sanction slavery in Massachusetts a generation later. And it was Perkins’s claim of equal souls and unequal bodies that led Puritan preachers like Cotton and Mather to minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies.4
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Water pumps generally had four bolts the thickness of thumbs that screwed them into the base. My job was to remove the nuts from these four bolts. Because the workshop floor was damp, over the years the nuts had rusted into iron lumps. I put the wrench in place and started to turn it forcefully, using the exact same arm motion as rowing. Later I met a man from England who’d been on the Cambridge University rowing team and had nearly competed in the Olympics. He’d talked about this noble sport, proudly rolling up his sleeves and giving me a look at his biceps, round and smooth, like half-globes. I pulled up my sleeves too and showed him my biceps, which were in the same league as his. The English man was overjoyed and asked me what sport I played. I told him I played Rusty Screws.
Lu Nei (Young Babylon)
NƠI HỌC TIẾNG ANH CHO TRẺ EM TPHCM TỐT NHẤT Tại sao chọn Bambi English Tại Bambi English, giáo dục trẻ em là tất cả những gì chúng tôi làm vì đam mê. Thành công của mỗi em chính là thành công của chúng tôi. Không gì vui hơn khi nhìn thấy sự tiến bộ hằng ngày, từng chứng chỉ tiếng Anh các em đạt được. Chúng tôi không ngừng nghiên cứu và cải tiến nhằm mang đến môi trường học tiếng Anh tốt nhất cho trẻ em. Và hoàn thành sứ mệnh giúp cho tất cả trẻ em ở Việt Nam được học và tiếp cận với ngoại ngữ nhanh nhất. Chúng tôi kết hợp các phương pháp học tập tiên tiến như giáo dục hướng cá nhân, Kumon, và giáo trình chuẩn quốc tế Cambridge để giúp các em tiến bộ nhanh và không bao giờ quên. Bên cạnh đó, việc tiết kiệm thời gian cho học viên và phụ huynh cũng là một mỗi quan tâm, do đó chúng tôi ưu tiên việc tự do xếp lịch học cho phụ huynh và sẵn sàng đón nhận học viên ở bất cứ thời gian nào. Ở Bambi, không có ngày khai giảng cũng không có ngày kết thúc, bé có thể theo học bất cứ lúc nào mà không sợ bị theo sau các học viên khác.
Bambi English
Judging from my experience as a graduate of one university and the wife of a professor attached to another, it does seem to me that academic life in any country tends to make both men and women narrow, censorious and self-important. My husband I believe to be among the excep- tions, but one or two of his young donnish contemporaries have been responsible for some of the worst exhibitions of bad manners that I have ever encountered. Apparently most dons grow out of this contemptuous brusqueness as the years go by ; elderly professors, though often disapproving, are almost always punctilious. On the whole I have found American dons politer than English, and those from provincial universities more courteous than the Oxford and Cambridge variety.
Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth)
7 “Chitta vritti nirodha” (Yoga Sutras I:2), which may also be translated as “cessation of the modifications of the mind-stuff.” Chitta is a comprehensive term for the thinking principle, which includes the pranic life forces, manas (mind or sense consciousness), ahamkara (egoity), and buddhi (intuitive intelligence). Vritti (literally “whirlpool”) refers to the waves of thought and emotion that ceaselessly arise and subside in man’s consciousness. Nirodha means neutralization, cessation, control. 8 The six orthodox (Vedas-based) systems are Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta, Mimamsa, Nyaya, and Vaisesika. Readers of a scholarly bent will delight in the subtleties and broad scope of these ancient formulations as summarized in English in A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, by Prof. Surendranath Dasgupta (Cambridge Univ. Press). 9 Not to be confused with the “Noble Eightfold Path” of Buddhism, a guide to man’s conduct, as follows: (1) right ideals, (2) right motive, (3) right speech, (4) right action, (5) right means of livelihood, (6) right effort, (7) right remembrance (of the Self), and (8) right realization (samadhi).
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi (Self-Realization Fellowship))