Quotes from Linda Colley

Any kind of new U.K. federal system would almost certainly demand the creation of a written constitution. Properly drafted, such a document could, among many things, pin down more effectively the proper dimensions of prime ministerial power.

I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.

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

In both British and American history, fervent imperialism has always coexisted with bouts of fierce isolationism.

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.

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 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.

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

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

It was hardly their own shining abilities alone that allowed a son, two grandsons, and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill to make their way into parliament.

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

Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.

Instead of exporting what they perceived to be rational, modern, humane government to their colonies, the British often found themselves propping up deeply unattractive and corrupt princelings and client rulers because this was the cheapest way of maintaining control.

Although England, and the rest of the United Kingdom, possesses momentous constitutional texts and significant statutes, since the 1600s there has been no systematic attempt to codify the powers and limits of the British executive and the rights of those it governs.

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.

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

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

One of the reasons why the personnel of U.S. politics are more diverse is that - unlike the U.K. - one can compete for the top job without spending long years, or any years, in the nation's legislature.

America is the proud possessor of the oldest extant written constitution in the world, which was for its time - 1787 - a highly innovative and important document.

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.

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

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.'

Although Britain has, since 1653, had nothing approaching a single, codified constitution, it did for a very long time possess a broad cult of constitutional writing. The Petition of Right of 1628, like the Bill of Rights of 1689, was a cherished text. So, most of all, was Magna Carta.

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.