Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was in Boston, Massachusetts, when Princess Diana died.
Men and women do not live by bread alone. They also need sustaining ideas.
Most national holidays in most countries rest on selective memories of the past.
In Great Britain, woman was subordinate and confined. But at least she was also safe.
Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.
One knows something is important when the powers that be choose not to acknowledge it in public.
There can never be a single, satisfactory comprehensive account of the 'history of the British empire.'
Too close and unthinking an allegiance to Washington has sometimes got British governments into trouble.
American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.
America's entire homeland security enterprise positively invites questions even as it strives to reassure.
It is hard to convince people that you mean them well if you are looking at them down the barrel of a gun.
The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government.
In both British and American history, fervent imperialism has always coexisted with bouts of fierce isolationism.
Hillary Clinton is tough, clever, and formidably well briefed, and has been politically ambitious all her adult life.
Thanksgiving is America's favourite holiday, and a brilliant piece of personal as well as patriotic calendrical invention.
The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.
The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it.
Like the proverbial elephant in the room, American anti-Europeanism has loomed large for so long that few trouble to notice it.
Globalisation is not remotely new; it has been occurring, at differing rates and with differing degrees of scale, for centuries.
Acts of violence against one's own countrymen that are legitimated by religion are not new. Nor have such acts been unique to Islam.
America's soldiery, like its war dead, comes disproportionately from its southern states and from its aspiring poor - both white and black.
In 21st-century America, as in Georgian Britain, elections are raucous, flamboyant, flag-waving, expensive, and sometimes ramshackle things.
Partly because women in the U.S. are better represented in the hierarchies, the culture wars over gender there have been particularly fierce.
Anyone who has spoken to experienced combat troops knows that they rarely brag about their exploits. Strong and silent is the preferred style.
If you believe you are the city on the hill, the world's best hope, it is tempting also to believe that outside your boundaries are barbarians.
As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.
One of the benefits of working outside the U.K. is that I don't have to keep fielding media/politicians' enquiries about 'Britishness' and its ills.
Even leaving aside its military bases, America's influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised.
Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.
It was hardly their own shining abilities alone that allowed a son, two grandsons, and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill to make their way into parliament.
In the U.S., highly selective renditions of its history have served in practice to impose blinkers on some of its citizens and catered to vested interests.
Transatlantic flights are unflattering. Hairstyles flop. Makeup melts away. Faces shrivel or swell from dehydration, and contact lenses give way to spectacles.
Far from being aberrant and un-British, criticising a war in which our troops are actively engaged is a long-established parliamentary and political tradition.
Historically, religion has often proved a more lethal and more divisive force than any secular ideology. It has also often been a more divisive force than race.
A break-up of the U.K. would affect the deployment and strength of its armed forces and play havoc with the ownership of its overseas consulships and embassies.
America is the proud possessor of the oldest extant written constitution in the world, which was for its time - 1787 - a highly innovative and important document.
Responding to Britain's future challenges will require unceasing agility in seeking out new alliances and refurbishing old ones inside Europe, not just outside it.
The U.S. is the most benign great power we will see in our lifetimes, and it is important for global peace that its leaders continue to value being viewed as benign.
The gulf between imperial ideals and empire on the ground has customarily proved disillusioning not only for colonial peoples but also for some in the occupying power.
Once you know how completely and suddenly the earth can open up at your feet and the worst can happen, it also, paradoxically, leaves you more afraid of everything else.
Historically, individuals possessed of the confidence that privilege and good fortune bestow have often proved conspicuous reformers: think only of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
At one level Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century was like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, both three and one, and altogether something of a mystery.
The American revolution not only cost Britain the 13 colonies but also forced it to rethink the slave trade and slavery, and influenced its power relations in Asia and the Pacific.
Conservative and Labour governments have arguably championed British rights in Brussels so ostentatiously in order to deflect public attention away from their deference to Washington.
Brussels and its multifarious networks provide member states not just with trading access but also a guarantee of regular encounters, negotiations, contacts, informants, and alliances.
Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.
Never fly to the U.S. the day before Thanksgiving or the weekend after because every airport is guaranteed to be crammed to bursting with people in transit to, or from, their home town.
Since the Second World War, as female expectations and opportunities have risen, becoming a royal woman - and remaining a royal woman - has seemed less and less an attractive proposition.
The argument that any income redistribution is tantamount to socialism, and that socialism has always been unAmerican, has helped legitimise keeping taxes on America's very wealthy very low.
Now, as in the past, rank is closely associated with modes of representation and display: with making an ordered arrangement of people or things visible and evident to onlookers in some fashion.