Before Quote by Richard Flanagan

So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.

— Norman Davies

The British people have always been a practical breed.

— Damian Green

Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants, remains obscure; one must remember we are dealing with barbarians.

— Tacitus

Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an…

— Benjamin Disraeli

England was nothing, compared to continental nations until she had become commercial... until about the middle of the last century, when a number of…

— Samuel Smiles

“But nevertheless, what remains - very broadly diffused through the modern British consciousness - is a warmish afterglow generated by a sense that Britain's…

— Stephen Green

Britain no longer exists. It is a trace of what it used to be.

— Muammar al-Gaddafi

When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair,…

— James Buchan

A land may be said to be discovered the first time a European, presumably an Englishman, sets foot on it.

— Vilhjalmur Stefansson

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early…

— Robert Darnton

That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

— Thomas Carlyle

Еhere's no doubt at all that the Norman conquest led to the hugely concentrated land ownership patterns that we still see in Britain today.…

— Paul Kingsnorth