Top 66 Linda Colley Quotes

Many Americans remain very interested in royal goings-on in general, and not just because of their soap-opera appeal. To a greater degree than any other polity, Britain functions as Americans’ defining ‘other.’

In Britain, British history is naturally a mainstream subject. Step outside your own narrow specialism, and you can find yourself treading on someone else’s toes. But in America, British history is an eccentric, minority pursuit, and while this can be intellectually isolating, it also permits extraordinary freedom.

Britain, like other European states, is not and never will again be in the top-world-power league, so its male leaders can afford to play subtler, more variegated roles. Leaders of the U.S. don’t have that option.

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.

The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government.

Even leaving aside its military bases, America’s influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised.

Far from being aberrant and un-British, criticising a war in which our troops are actively engaged is a long-established parliamentary and political tradition.

In 21st-century America, as in Georgian Britain, elections are raucous, flamboyant, flag-waving, expensive, and sometimes ramshackle things.

A society that feels itself to be flourishing is likely to interpret everything that happens to its own advantage and in its own image. By contrast, a society that feels confused or in decline often converts any event – however innocuous – into a weapon of self-laceration.

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain’s politicians – and its Foreign Office – have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

Since the Second World War, as female expectations and opportunities have risen, becoming a royal woman – and remaining a royal woman – has seemed less and less an attractive proposition.

Most national holidays in most countries rest on selective memories of the past.

I don’t even know if I’m British any more. I’m transatlantic, I’m European.

If the U.S. and its allies can invade a weaker country on the excuse it is abetting terrorism, then why should not India, say, launch a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan on the self-same grounds?

Thanksgiving is America’s favourite holiday, and a brilliant piece of personal as well as patriotic calendrical invention.

I’m struck by how impressively John Elliott assimilated new work on early modern England and colonial America, as well as keeping abreast with his own Hispanic studies, so as to write his recent ‘Empires of the Atlantic World.’

British prime ministers and prime ministers’ spouses and children are together becoming ever more like first families. They need to be given sufficient resources and personnel to enable them to carry out their shifting roles efficiently, decently, and safely.

America’s entire homeland security enterprise positively invites questions even as it strives to reassure.

From the very beginning, Americans have exhibited a taste for expansion, an appetite for empire. One of the fundamental reasons for this is very clear. Like every other western empire that has ever existed, Americans may claim to have inherited the mantle of ancient Rome.

As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.

For a very long time, loyalists were often left out of patriotic American histories of the revolution. Or they were caricatured as upper-class Tory reactionaries, or – rather like the Jacobites – made the subject only of nostalgic antiquarianism.

Like the proverbial elephant in the room, American anti-Europeanism has loomed large for so long that few trouble to notice it.

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the ‘other,’ as that ‘old world’ against which they define themselves.

Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.

Now, as in the past, rank is closely associated with modes of representation and display: with making an ordered arrangement of people or things visible and evident to onlookers in some fashion.

Once you know how completely and suddenly the earth can open up at your feet and the worst can happen, it also, paradoxically, leaves you more afraid of everything else.

In the past, rulers led their troops into battle and, even in peacetime, called themselves fathers of their people. And modern politics retains abundant masculine rituals. Prime minister’s question time in Britain, for instance, is a stylised duel and tournament redolent of testosterone.

The gulf between imperial ideals and empire on the ground has customarily proved disillusioning not only for colonial peoples but also for some in the occupying power.

Conservative and Labour governments have arguably championed British rights in Brussels so ostentatiously in order to deflect public attention away from their deference to Washington.

The children of politicians learn the allure and tricks of politics along with their alphabet. They inherit a network of useful contacts, and – if they’re lucky – a name that confers instant voter recognition.

For good or for ill, Britain is in some respects moving away from a prime-ministerial system towards a presidential one. This is emphatically not, as is sometimes argued, simply a function of Tony Blair’s personal ambition. The shift towards a more presidential style was already visible under Margaret Thatcher.

Transatlantic flights are unflattering. Hairstyles flop. Makeup melts away. Faces shrivel or swell from dehydration, and contact lenses give way to spectacles.

America’s soldiery, like its war dead, comes disproportionately from its southern states and from its aspiring poor – both white and black.

A break-up of the U.K. would affect the deployment and strength of its armed forces and play havoc with the ownership of its overseas consulships and embassies.

Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative ‘classlessness’ of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.

In the U.S., highly selective renditions of its history have served in practice to impose blinkers on some of its citizens and catered to vested interests.

Historically, individuals possessed of the confidence that privilege and good fortune bestow have often proved conspicuous reformers: think only of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.

If you believe you are the city on the hill, the world’s best hope, it is tempting also to believe that outside your boundaries are barbarians.

In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies.

Many Britons who backed Brexit believed – and believe still – that a U.K. ‘freed’ from ‘Europe’ would be able to recover and re-establish its historic destiny as an independent global trading nation.

Acts of violence against one’s own countrymen that are legitimated by religion are not new. Nor have such acts been unique to Islam.

States that have experienced revolutions or have acquired their independence from empires – such as the U.S. or Australia – tend to celebrate their constitutional documents and put them on show in special galleries so that every citizen can become familiar with them. In the U.K., this is not properly done.

Anyone who has spoken to experienced combat troops knows that they rarely brag about their exploits. Strong and silent is the preferred style.

There can never be a single, satisfactory comprehensive account of the ‘history of the British empire.’

Even at its most powerful, Britain always needed alliances with other European states. There would almost certainly have been no British victory at Waterloo, for instance, without the assistance of Prussia.

Globalisation is not remotely new; it has been occurring, at differing rates and with differing degrees of scale, for centuries.

Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.