Quotes About Britain

The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain's Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. Phipps wrote, "The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.

But far more than France was at stake, he added. He raised the specter of Britain, too, succumbing to Hitler's influence and warned that a new and pro-German government might then replace his own. "If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.

Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.)

Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain's strategy had undergone a change.

These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.

It was conceived out of hubris and anxiety, at a time—1903—when Britain feared it was losing the race for dominance of the passenger-ship industry.

German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In

The one economic medicine so bitter that no minister in the seventies had thought of trying it was duly uncorked and poured into the spoon. It was time for Britain to grimace and open her mouth.

Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life – an unabashed soppiness, if you will – really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop.

Immigration has changed Britain more than almost any other single social event in post-1945 Britain – more than the increase in longevity, or the Pill, the collapse of deference or the spread of suburban housing. The only change which eclipses it is the triumph of the car.

Britain, where the establishment of a local library board required a taxpayer levy, the take-up rate was initially sluggish. Even when a library rate was proposed, hostile campaigning, often underwritten by the powerful brewers' lobby, could ensure that it was defeated.

Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.

Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain's 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain's 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack.15 The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon's weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

As a Free Trader, he was convinced by Mayo's detailed arguments, supported by a large quantity of evidence, that far from Britain being an economic drain on India, trade had been mutually beneficial.117 The fact that almost all the richest people in India were Indian merchants or princes, not Britons, struck him as further evidence that the British were not the exploitative colonialists of other European empires in Asia and Africa.

one of the most important I ever wrote', asking for arms to be lent or leased to Britain under a programme whereby Britain would repay the United States over the very long term.153 (Even he would probably not have guessed that the final instalment of the loan, of $83.25 million, would only be repaid in 2006.)

Pacificism was rife at the time Ã¢â'¬â€œ 11.6 million Britons signed the League of Nations' 'Peace Ballot' in 1934–5 Ã¢â'¬â€œ and it was far easier psychologically for people to portray Churchill as a warmonger

When Reynaud asked what would happen when the Germans attempted to invade Britain, Churchill replied, 'I haven't thought that out very carefully, but, broadly speaking, I should propose to drown as many as possible of them on the way over, and then "frapper sur la tête" [knock on the head] anyone who managed to crawl ashore.

Paul Nash's 1941 painting The Battle of Britain

The Daily Express declares that Britain will not be involved in a European war this year, or next year either'.

Ultimately over half a million Germans died from aerial bombardment during the war, to Britain's 58,000.

As soon as the war ended, Churchill immediately set about writing The World Crisis. It was to be packed with lessons for the future. 'No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion,' he wrote. 'No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.

It seems extraordinary, but even on the eve of D-Day, four years after de Gaulle had set up the Free French in London, the leaders of both Britain and the United States felt such distrust of him. But they detested his French chauvinism and genuinely feared that he might try to turn France into an anti-Western Gaullist dictatorship after the war.

British history.

I think you will find scientists that think like you in Germany and Britain, and you will find politicians that think like Weinberger. I think the most bellicose ruling group in the Western world at the moment is the British.