#britain

In Britain you're more used to challenging drama. In America, TV is just boring, and numbing, and bloody terrible. ↗

— Michael Imperioli

#bloody #boring #britain #challenging #drama

When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British. ↗

— Michael King

#britain #british #child #coherence #commonwealth

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain. ↗

— Arabella Weir

#boarding #britain #diplomat #expected #fact

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

— Johann Hari

#britain #elizabeth-ii #monarchy #monarchy-of-the-uk #postage-stamps

I was a product of the times, the war, the occupation, the reoccupation, my 4 years in Britain, admiring but at the same time questioning whether they are able to do a better job than we can. ↗

— Lee Kuan Yew

#admiring #better #better job #britain #i

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. ↗

— Zadie Smith

#nhs #age

Britain, however, has ended up specialising in the ones you don't see as much of: defence aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 per cent of the world's mobile phones. And so there's a danger that because it doesn't have a British flag on it, people won't realise that we actually do produce value. ↗

— Evan Davis

#aerospace #because #britain #british #cars

Phyllis is one of the tunnel boring machines for Crossrail and one of the most extraordinary characters I met, visiting some of the most exciting infrastructure in Britain. Crossrail is the new railway which will run from West to East right across London. It is the biggest engineering project in Europe - and Phyllis herself is not exactly dainty. ↗

— Evan Davis

#biggest #boring #britain #characters #dainty

But I am an optimist about Britain; and the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is not that the optimist believes the world is wonderful and the pessimist believes it's beset by challenges; the difference is the pessimist believes we will be defeated by them; the optimist thinks the challenges can be overcome. ↗

— Tony Blair

#am #believes #beset #between #britain

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world. ↗

— Tony Blair

#american #britain #driven #evil #friends