Quotes from David McKie

It has come to pass', she wrote, in lines that reverberate still, 'that the working class is used, so to speak, as the unit of the moral investigation, until we well nigh believe that this class is the chief repository of the vices and virtues of the nation'.

The shirts of the referee and his touch judges, as if to confirm everything that crowds have ever suspected about match officials, carry the legend Specsavers.)

the relationship between London and the rest of the country was described by Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, perhaps the supreme authority on the workings of modern-day London, as 'a bit like a relationship between a grumpy couple. They know they've got to be together, but they always sort of see each other's weaknesses more clearly than anybody else would'.

They used to build locomotives in Gateshead, very fine complicated powerful locomotives, but they never seem to have had time to build a town'.

What was it that the eighteenth-century traveller said about Mull? 'Italy itself, with all the assistance of art, can hardly afford anything more beautiful and diverting'. On this blessed September evening that verdict needs no amendment.

The law locks up the man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ But leaves the greater villain loose/ who steals the common from the goose'.

A Warwickshire priest, John Rous, writing a history of England at the end of the fifteenth century, chronicled the ruthless large-scale destruction inflicted on the North by William the Conqueror (see chapter 14), and asked what now should be said of the 'modern' destruction of villages. 'The root of this evil', he said, 'is greed. The plague of avarice infects these times and it blinds men. They are not the sons of God, but of Mammon'.