Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the...

Frank Olson had joined the Special Operations Division of the Army’s Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick at its inception in 1950. He was issued a Q clearance, the civilian equivalent of the military’s top secret clearance, and worked with the CIA on MK-ULTRA.As part of that work, he traveled in 1953 to Britain, France and...

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait...

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

It’s nice to watch television but it’s even nicer when you’ve got a drink in your hand,’ Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. ‘Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you’re in a posh cabaret.

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.

The prince’s official job description as king will be ‘defender of the faith,’ which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing...

But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.

When sin ceases to pay, we have a happy knack of finding out that it is wrong; so after a bit, when Virginia, and Georgia and the Carolinas had ceased to belong to us, we began to denounce this trade in African flesh, and to denounce it in no stinted terms.

I don’t think wood was discovered in Britain until the 1970’s. That’s when I discovered it anyway.

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

I am very pro-royal. Britain without them would be a sadder place.

One if by land, two if by sea.

Britain does not normally these days play a huge part in peacekeeping.

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the...

I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.

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.

One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.

There is more than enough room in the world for Germany and Britain.

Hating Britain is a fundamental part of being British

Well that explains a lot.

I think Britain would be alright, if only we had a different Government.

I certainly didn’t concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stress-tested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British...

England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.

What’s similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms...

Sir, I shall not defeat you – I shall transcend you.

Uhh… people?

Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain Britain. So conform to it, or don’t come here.

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler’s former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression...

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.

An enormous semiofficial drug-smuggling operation was established in order to improve Britain’s unfavorable balance of payments with China—the direct result of the British love of tea.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and...

When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.

We have no quarrel with the German nation,One would not quarrel with a flock of sheep.But, generation after generation,They throw up leaders who disturb our sleep.

I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.

As a nation the people of this lovely island called Britain, are at the point where even one honest politician could give us a collective and conceptual nervous breakdown.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been ‘sold’ to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was...

In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting...

The U.S. and Britain are incapable of controlling all of Iraq.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the ‘capabilities’ of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at...

Britain can sometimes feel like a very small village, and you’re this, I dunno, scarlet woman they’re all gossiping about.

Nice mix of Tory MPs saying this issue shouldn’t be used for petty political pointscoring, & Tory MPs trying to score petty political points.

This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, ‘When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.’ But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal...

I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, my initiation into the sacred knowledge—or should I say gnosis?—of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang...

This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII. At a point in the not-too-remote future, the stout heart of Queen Elizabeth II will cease to beat. At that precise moment, her firstborn son will become head of state, head of the armed forces, and head...

The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople—those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the ‘savages’ of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the...