David Cameron wants people to believe that his isolation in Europe is a result of Britain being outnumbered when it matters most.
History never repeats, but there are the obvious precedents that pessimists can reach for: Sarajevo, 1914; the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, 1938. But equally relevant might be the tragically meaningless guarantees Britain extended to Poland in 1939.
Anya Hindmarch is indeed a handbag designer; she has the requisite fabulous life, tasteful home, and loving husband. She is also beautiful and self-deprecating, and has five children aged 5 to 20 and a philanthropic bent which spans causes from cancer care to Britain’s Conservative Party.
Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain’s, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.
In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
You can watch TV and see experts of all different colours and hues. But the minute you get past nine o’clock and you’re in primetime drama land, it’s like entering another world, one that doesn’t reflect the diversity of the society that we have in Britain in 2016.
We need to dig deep and give people a reason to be optimistic just as Obama is doing in America. Because in the same way that outcome of the U.S. elections will change the course of events there and around the world, so too do politics here in Britain.
One of the reasons Elton and I entered into our partnership – the first day it became legal in Britain to do so – is that we felt it was an opportunity to protect ourselves with official recognition of our relationship.
There are far too many people in university in Britain. If you want to make money, be a plumber.
I enjoy worldbuilding very much. I generally start with an approximation. With ‘Flesh and Spirit’ and ‘Breath and Bone,’ because I was thinking of a world on the brink of a dark age, I began with the sense of Roman Britain. But I purposely set the geography to match something other than Britain – which has been overdone.
There are great things that Britain can do in the future as a progressive beacon. By voting Leave, we have that opportunity.
‘Captives’ was a deliberate bridging exercise, an attempt to use detailed knowledge of what Britain was like on the inside, to reach a deeper, more variegated understanding of how its peoples experienced external adventures and aggression over a quarter of a millennium in four continents.
I chose to wear the hijab at age 16, soon after my family moved from Britain to Saudi Arabia.
In 1907, Britain and Russia signed a treaty dividing Iran between them; no Iranian was at the negotiations or even knew they were taking place.
Following the principle that you should know your enemy, the BBC has assiduously recorded the relentless rise of Rupert Murdoch and his assault on the old ‘decadent’ elites of Britain.
Britain is an open and tolerant country, and I will fight with everything I have to keep it so.
In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
When people go to vote still in Britain, they will look at their local representatives, but I don’t think there is a sort of cult of personality politics. Obviously, they want to know who the leader is for each party, but I think there is a lot of identification with their local candidates.
When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain.
What I can say that’s different in American television… in Britain, they wouldn’t cancel something after a couple of episodes. In the States they would. They would just decide it’s not working, take it off and put something else in on the fall schedule.
Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain’s wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.
Basically, particularly in Britain, it’s a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.
In an era of billion-person countries and trillion-pound economies, we need to find ways to amplify our voice. We are most likely to be heard when the Chinese negotiate with a £10 trillion E.U., not a £1.5 trillion Britain.
I’ve teamed up with one of the headmasters at Eton College, and we’re spearheading a kind of ‘slow education movement in Britain’. It’s based on this idea of moving away from the fast-food approach to learning and going to something deeper, more woolly, harder to measure.
I can understand why some people might look at me and say, ‘What’s she got to be depressed about?’ I get that a lot in Britain, where mental health issues seem to be a big taboo.
You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it’s the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there’s not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.
Britain produces great actors because they learn on stage so know their stuff when they get on a movie set.
In Britain, it’s bred into you, the idea that you can’t really change anything, so why bother. When I went to school in America, it was the total opposite view – you, as an individual, can change anything and everything. It’s how you’re raised.
I get standing ovations at meetings when I say Britain should be involved in human spaceflight. Unfortunately, that goal has been blocked by a handful of people in high office.
People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
I sometimes think God allows Great Britain to be unprincipled for the good of mankind.
Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets, and we name our animals, but we’re not too worried about industrial hunting practices.
Politics has got too personal, too nasty, in Britain, as it has in America.
There are two Tory parties: the trendy, socially liberal Notting Hill set which dominates at the national level, and the unreconstructed, reactionary, and often bigoted members of Conservative associations at the local level. The latter have yet to reconcile themselves to the reality of modern, multiracial Britain.
Britain is characterized not just by its independence but, above all, by its openness.
I have a British voice and a rather formal one at that, having been brought up in post-WWII Britain. My voice is perfectly suited to the sort of book I write, I think. It would not fit a contemporary, besides which I do not know enough about the contemporary world to write convincingly or comfortably about it!
Something is happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or a transformation; nobody is quite sure which.
So long as the Oregon question is left open, Mexico will calculate the chances of a rupture between us and Great Britain, in the event of which she would be prepared to make common cause against us. But when an end is put to any such hope, she will speedily settle her difference with us.
Britain has trend-setting fashion, ground-breaking scientists, and innovative technology companies. It is also a welcome home for investors.
I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt – Gordon Brown’s legacy to millions of Britain’s families – will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.
I have always felt an excellent rapport ever since my very first concert in Britain at Hampton Court. I have always felt understood. The British understand opera very well.
The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.
Britain needs a tough, strong financial conduct regulator.
It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers.
Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
If I’d been on the Remain side I would have tried to have seen the best in Europe and tried to explain that. Instead, what they’ve done is endlessly try and talk up what they see as the weaknesses of Britain and they aren’t there. That’s a total mistake.
Britain’s destiny lies in Europe.
Britain is producing some of the worst films in the world. Our film industry is desperate to be part of America, and we just churn out flaccid imitations of bad films over there.
New Labour was the most short-sighted, self-serving, incompetent, useless, and ineffective government that Britain has ever known. Make no mistake, Labour’s economic policies were a national security liability.
