One if by land, two if by sea.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowTags: america american-revolution britain paul-revere-s-ride
Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street.
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
Zadie SmithTags: libraries library britain
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
George OrwellTags: war imperialism britain india colonialism british-empire pukka-sahibs
In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
William GoldingI would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners.
Edmund IronsideTags: history world-war-ii germany britain
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.
Winston S. ChurchillTags: duty britain commonwealth finest-hour
The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.
Martin AmisTags: england britain 2012 schadenfreude brooklyn-public-library
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
Oscar WildeThe Welsh are not like any other people in Britain, and they know how separate they are. They are the Celts, the tough little wine-dark race who were the original possessors of the island, who never mixed with the invaders coming later from the east, but were slowly driven into the western mountains.
Laurie LeeTags: welsh survivors britain celts wales invaders aborigines
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