You know, sometimes I don’t understand what’s wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don’t seem to have the gumption to exploit our...

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

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.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

London is one of the world’s centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications....

Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.

British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words ‘Special Relationship’ to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On...

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that...

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the...

This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. …But we have a difficult situation here so I...

It is truth, in the old saying, that is ‘the daughter of time,’ and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one...

The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

America: It’s like Britain, only with buttons.

Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things...

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken...

The rich feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God. Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now...

Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable

Yeah. Floyd is his batman.”His what?”Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant.”You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.