For all its bluster, the BDS campaign is most notable, I think, for its lack of success. Trade is booming; tourism is soaring. The media campaign is full of sound and fury, but to the majority of Britain today, it signifies nothing.
James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.
I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain – or as grown-up as I’ll ever get.
The moral of filmmaking in Britain is that you will be screwed by the weather.
We need to underline the need for Britain to depart from the European Union in an orderly fashion.
Here’s the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That’s not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.
Britain, today, educates 4.8 million primary school children in Britain. And we educate five million primary school children around the developing world, at a cost of 2.5 per cent of what we spend on British children.
Britain is rich in radicalism, and anyone who says that our society has drifted into fatalism and apathy should get out more.
David Cameron’s approach has left Britain weakened and weary because to retreat from the world is as foolish as it is futile.
I think Brits probably feel that Americans are more like us than vice-versa, if that makes sense. Because we get everything American over here in Britain, but yet there are things which are staunchly English that you guys don’t have.
When the Americans are behind you, they’re behind you 100%, and this gives you real confidence as an architect. They expect you to lead a building project – to make the kind of big and costly decisions that, in Britain, have been handed over to project managers and cost-cutters.
Fundamental systemic crises are often associated with the decline of the dominant imperial power and its increasing inability to sustain the system over which it had previously presided. The profound instability of the interwar period owed much to Britain’s inability to maintain its role.
Never forget that it sometimes takes a foreigner’s eye to capture Britain most clearly.
Close to a billion people – one-eighth of the world’s population – still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.
One of the most heartening phenomena in today’s Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd – the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.
In the ’70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.
Far from protecting children, the abuse of Article 8 risks making them pawns – subject to coercion or worse – as part of a criminal’s desperate struggle to stay in Britain.
I am not as cross about Thatcher now as I was in the ’80s. Begrudgingly, I can see that some of her policies helped modernise Britain.
I’ve put myself forward to be involved. Whether I get picked, we’ll have to wait and see. Obviously everybody is excited about it, about the Olympics coming to London and the football being played in different parts of Britain.
I know in Britain with ‘Doctor Who’ all the classic actors, and the people who you’d really want to, work on the show. I like that the fact that ‘Torchwood’ has actors that want to be involved from the stage. It has raised our game, and I’m just happy for good actors who want to be in sci-fi shows who love the genre.
Britain is a parliamentary democracy. Power rests in Parliament, in the House of Commons, and the government – the executive – has to seek the consent of MPs for its legislation.
When you look at people cooking in Britain – and Dubai, too – they’re not that adventurous. They need to be encouraged somehow. And not everybody needs to be shouted at.
When you want to make it clear to the rest of the world that you are not an imperialist, the best countries to have with you are Britain and Spain.
I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.
In 21st-century America, as in Georgian Britain, elections are raucous, flamboyant, flag-waving, expensive, and sometimes ramshackle things.
The first war zone was declared by Great Britain. She gave us and the world notice of it on the 4th day of November, 1914. The zone became effective Nov. 5, 1914.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim – or wish to, at least – that Lord Balfour’s Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn’t just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.
Formed in 1967 and still performing regularly half a century later, Fairport Convention are Britain’s equivalent of the Band. Unlike the latter they have maintained cordial relations.
The bond between the United States and Britain has always been strong. It has survived through war and peace, periods of prosperity and economic hardship.
I love the Royal Family and every aspect of Britain and what we have achieved in history.
In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare.
For John le Carre, it was always who’s betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the ’30s, it’s a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
The American revolution not only cost Britain the 13 colonies but also forced it to rethink the slave trade and slavery, and influenced its power relations in Asia and the Pacific.
If Britain is to have a stable, affordable pension system, people need to work longer, but we will reward their hard work with a decent state pension that will enable them to enjoy quality of life in their retirement.
I always say to anybody who’s going over to America for the first time, ‘Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.’ Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody’s so quiet, scared to laugh. It’s like being in church.
The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.
South America was not really that open – you had to fit in, and I didn’t fit in. I was different – my tastes, my point of view – were a bit weird, and I found in Britain a sense of calm, that I could just be.
I never, ever imagined leaving Great Britain.
Britain leads the way in fund raising. I am so proud of Britain.
If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you’re going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he’s obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.
Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.
Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don’t look around enough. They don’t know enough.
I’ve always been a history lover. I’ve spent a lot of recreational time walking around historical castles and estates, in Britain and Europe, and so I know what the real thing looks like.
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me – but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn’t.
Britain does not normally these days play a huge part in peacekeeping.
We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.
In ‘The Hobbit,’ there were British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand actors, and Peter Jackson was adamant that we would all sound like we were from Britain somewhere.
When Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, Britain expected that America would soon lose heart and surrender, too. From then on, London’s chief aims were to bring a swift conclusion to the war and capture as much territory as possible in order to gain the best advantage in the inevitable peace talks.
In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It’s so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you’re going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you’re born working class, you’re going to stay there, although that is changing.
While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.
