Quotes About England

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter's, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don't try to go it alone, or they'll think you're pirates.

England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors' covenant; peace is what they offer.

The king squeezes his shoulder. There is a new magic in the royal touch. It transmits a vision, a vision of what England could be. You imagine the city of London in the days when prophets walk its streets, when angels cluster on gable ends; you look up as you leave your house, hearing their strong wingbeats in the air.

If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey's creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. Look at Norfolk, already he is sixty, his father was seventy when he fought at Flodden. And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter's, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don't try to go it alone, or they'll think you're pirates.

The Cromwells – father, son and nephew – are of an ancient breed too. Were we not all conceived in Eden? When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman? When the Cromwells stroll out this week, the gentlemen of England get out of their way.

I was quite discerning the first year and when I was doing 'The Vampire Diaries' thing I was like, 'I'm really not sure if I want to do this; it's this whole teen thing, which I've done in England.' My agent was like, 'Don't be silly, you'll make great money and everything.' But I wasn't sure.

Lately I've been falling asleep listening to 'Common One' by Van Morrison, specifically the song 'Summertime in England.' It's 15 minutes long, so to make it through the entire song is a real task unto itself, but Van has that emotional payoff that makes even his most tiresome songs more powerful than most people's entire catalog.

As a goalkeeper, Van der Sar can do everything. He is very good at coming off his line, and he is also effective as a libero - what they call in England a 'sweeper keeper.'

Lonnie Donegan and the folk movement were responsible for a lot of the spread of the blues in England. The group Them with Van Morrison was a big influence on me, too, as were The Stones; The Yardbirds, John Mayall, and the other British blues pioneers.

For a spinner growing up in England, it is challenging to become an off-spinner. The line and length needs to be altered on each of the four days of county cricket or five days of Test matches. The pitches in England don't have a set pattern. It changes with each day, and accordingly, the length varies.

I'm the captain of the Variety Club over in England, and so I'm playing golf for them once a week but doing odd bits.

Terry said he had this new kid and his wife didn't want to live in England. He wanted to tour. He hated being in the studio. Terry liked seeing various bars the world over and getting smashed out of his brain. He was a sort of latent Keith Moon.

The right of petition is an old undoubted household right of the blood of England, which runs in our veins.

For me, the business ventures in England were far more easier. Everything was done by the book, the protocols were far more easy to follow.

Then we did what we called basically I suppose a club tour in England, which was the time I think that our second album came out, we club toured around the whole country where the venues were hold to five hundreds upwards to that sort of thing you know.

Football is more verbal in Holland, but there is a different approach in England.

In contrast to our sinking taste, there has been a revival of interest in verse drama in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. The movement has been slow but sure and, above all, modest in its demands.

The hedges - yes, the hedges, the very synonym of Merry England - are yet there, and long may they remain. Without hedges England would not be England. Hedges, thick and high, and full of flowers, birds, and living creatures, of shade and flecks of sunshine dancing up and down the bark of the trees - I love their very thorns. You do not know how much there is in the hedges. (1884)

We will not permit aggressions. We will defend our rights; and, if it be necessary, we will claim from this Government, as the barons of England claimed from John, the grant of another Magna Charta for our protection.

hardly academically rigorous, revealed that English breakfast tea was misnamed in several ways. It came from India, Sri Lanka and Kenya, not England. It was imported to the British Isles by the Portuguese, who drank it in the afternoon. A Scotsman popularized its consumption at breakfast.

I had been particularly taken by a scene in The Old Country where Hilary, the spy who has defected to Moscow, muses about England: 'We're conceived in irony. We float in it from the womb. It's the amniotic fluid. It's the silver sea. It's the waters at their priest-like task, washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility. Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.

But to most of the English, their history is just that, history. The contrast is with Scotland or Ireland, where every self-respecting adult considers themselves to belong to an unbroken tradition stretching back to the wearing of woad: oppressed peoples remember their history.

But they were not in any meaningful sense religious, the Church of England being a political invention which had elevated being 'a good chap' to something akin to canonization.