dismissed as pure fantasy to suggest that 300 people could be carried far above the earth at 600 miles an hour. To reckon the pace of unforeseen change, one can also look further back. My father was born in 1875. He was nearly 30 before he saw a motor car. In his teens he may have talked with people who had been young when no one had ever travelled faster overland than a horse could gallop. Today it is but a short time ago that the revolution, not yet complete, launched by personal computers and laptops was beyond imagination’s range.
Tracing the history of all momentous revolutions, one usually comes back to a single person, with later development by two or three working together. Someone now living will unlock mysteries of which now we know nothing. Could it be that someone with such a key will be found among Selwyn men and women, present or future? Improbable perhaps, but you never can tell – you never can tell!
PART TWO
Selwyn has changed so much in the past 64 years – my slice of history – that it is tempting to think we are now on a plateau, that the heights have been scaled, that it is time for a rest. This is false – expect the unexpected.
THE RAMSAY MURRAY LECTURE 2011 Professor David Holton writes:
This year’s Ramsay Murray Lecture was given by Professor Judith Herrin, on 18 May, before a large and appreciative audience. A graduate of Newnham College, Judith Herrin was Professor of Byzantine History at Princeton University and subsequently Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London until her retirement in 2008. She maintains her connection with King’s as Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow, and continues to publish widely on Byzantium and the medieval world. The title of her lecture was: ‘The Surprising Empire: Byzantium between Islam and Europe.’ Professor Herrin first stressed the essential stability and adaptability of an empire that lasted more than 1,100 years, from the foundation of Constantinople as the capital of the East Roman Empire in 330 AD to its capture by the Ottomans in 1453. (Gibbon’s ‘decline and fall’ is a sweeping assessment of a very long sweep of history.) For many centuries Byzantium’s military strength was vital to the protection of Europe’s south-eastern flank. ‘Without Byzantium there would be no Europe.’ Christianity was the essential component of the empire’s ideology, but – paradoxically – its pagan Greco-Roman heritage was equally important to the vitality of Byzantine thought and culture. Professor Herrin stressed the cosmopolitan nature of Byzantine society, its enlightened view of difference, when compared with other medieval societies, and in particular the important role of women, as rulers, writers, and patrons of art and literature. Finally, she noted that the Ottoman Empire owed much to the example of Byzantium.
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