Quotes About Britain

Butlin had invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.

An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year.

The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa.

Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These

I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing—by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged backgrounds so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum.

It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation.

Nothing—really, absolutely nothing—says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.

The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: "My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?" Late

Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week.

VAT Value Added Tax, a sales tax (currently 17.5 percent in Britain) imposed on nearly everything.

Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all.

WHEN I was brand new to Britain and everything was still a mystery to me, I went with an English friend to Brighton for the day, and there I saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing a runway to nowhere was one that would never have occurred to me.

Nothing - and I mean, really, absolutely nothing - is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilised - more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines - and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever going to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

You can't have a more civilized community than one in which hospital staff play cricket at the end of a summer's day and lunatics can wander and mingle without exciting comment or alarm. It was wonderful, possibly unsurpassable. It really was. That was the Britain I came to. I wish it could be that place again.

The King's Ministers had long treasured a plan to send the enemies of Britain bad dreams. The Foreign Secretary had first proposed it in January 1808 and for over a year Mr Norrell had industriously sent the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte a bad dream each night, as a result of which nothing had happened.

By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons.

The heart of tradition, everyone agreed, but few understood Britain as well as Karamat Lone did and knew that within the deepest chamber of that heart of tradition was the engine of radical change.

In England, there's no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain.

We have sectors of the economy, aerospace is a good example, where Britain's probably the second country in the world, the automobile sector, where we've done extraordinarily well, an enormous amount of investment over the last couple of years, life sciences is another.

The irony is that we're really good at comedy in Britain, but for some reason, we make very few comedy films. And when we do, they're either quite American in style, or very Richard Curtis. And I like Richard Curtis, but I think only Richard Curtis should write Richard Curtis films, and other people should try and find their own style.

I mean, the thing is, is that Britain has got a great tradition of irreverent political satire.

Kneejerk interventionism or kneejerk isolationism is the wrong course for Britain.

Very few Italian restaurants in Britain do a good job. They're too scared to show you what real Italian food is like because they think you can't handle it, so they dilute it.