Quotes About British

I only started concentrating on football as a career when I left school at 18. I played golf for the Scottish and British boys' teams.

I loved 1990s television: 'The Fast Show,' 'Father Ted,' 'Harry Enfield.' 'Clive Anderson Talks Back.'

I think it has something to do with being British. We don't take ourselves as seriously as some other countries do. I think a lot of people take themselves far too seriously; I find that a very tedious attitude.

Americans are really harsh about British people's teeth.

I like the fact that I have good old-fashioned British teeth with a big gap.

I love British television. I love the irony, I love the authenticity and I love the roles I get put up for.

American television, for all its faults, still has a black presence in shows and even in commercials. You'll see black people in automobile ads, black women starring on their own television shows. We don't see that on British television.

I can always tell if a band has a British rhythm section due to the gritty production.

Some British actors are snobby about telly, and I don't understand that.

British girls are as temperamental as Americans.

Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.

I am unique and conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish.' Know who said that?" "Aleister Crowley," said Strike. "Unusual reading matter," said Creed, "for a decorated soldier in the British army." "Oh, we're all satanists on the sly," said Strike.

Would I call myself English?' he mused aloud. 'No, I'd probably say British.

A further feature that distinguished the experiences of South and North America was the absence of a racialist prohibition on intermarriage and interbreeding, which prevailed particularly in the slave states of the southern British colonies. In part this was because very few white women travelled across from Spain to Latin America; and in part because the Spanish did not suffer from the same type of racism and puritanism as northern European Protestantism.

If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

Many [British politicians] do not know much more of continental conditions than we do of the condition in Peru or Siam. They are also rather naive in their artless egoism. They find difficulty believing in really evil intentions in others; they are very calm, very phlegmatic, very optimistic. The country exudes wealth, comfort, content and confidence in its own power and future. The people simply cannot believe that things could ever go really wrong, either at home or abroad.

The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable.

the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken prisoner-of-war, amounted to 57,470 men.

German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regimental aid post (RAP) or at dressing stations and then returned to duty.

The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war and what remained of their national territory did not alter their belief in their own military superiority, or lead them into any feelings of gratitude towards their Anglo-Saxon allies.

on the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the French only played a minor part in the Somme offensive. On the first day of the Somme, the French divisions on the right also did far better than most of the British divisions.

During the Great War tens of thousands of German civilians died of malnutrition and starvation because of the British naval blockade; the accepted estimate is that between half a million and one million people died of hunger in Germany between 1914 and 1918

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The

America, he argued, did not need to triumph decisively over the heavily taxed British: a war of attrition that eroded British credit would nicely do the trick. All the patriots had to do was plant doubts among Britain's creditors about the war's outcome.