British Isles Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to British Isles. Here they are! All 100 of them:

The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
In the folklore of the British Isles, a bodach is a vile beast that slithers down chimneys at night and carries off children who misbehave. Rather like Inland Revenue agents.
Dean Koontz (Brother Odd (Odd Thomas, #3))
I grew up back and forth between the British Isles: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. I spent short periods of time in France, Italy, and South Africa. This is my first time in the States. I was disappointed by Atlanta at first — I'd wanted to live in New York-but it's grown on me.” Everything about Kaidan was exciting and exotic. This was my first time traveling away from home, and he'd already seen so much. I ate my apple, glad it was crisp and not soft. “Which was your favorite place?” I asked. “I've never been terribly attached to any place. I guess it would have to be...here.” I stopped midchew and examined his face. He wouldn't look at me. He was clenching his jaw, tense. Was he serious or was he teasing me? I swallowed my bite. “The Texas panhandle?” I asked. “No.” He seemed to choose each word with deliberate care. “I mean here in this car. With you.” Covered in goose bumps, I looked away from him and stared straight ahead at the road, letting my hand with the apple fall to my lap. He cleared his throat and tried to explain. “I've not talked like this with anyone, not since I started working, not even to the only four people in the world who I call friends. You have Patti, and even that boyfriend of yours. So this has been a relief of sort. Kind of...nice.” He cleared his throat again. Oh, my gosh. Did we just have a moment? I proceeded with caution, hoping not to ruin it. “It's been nice for me, too,” I said. “I've never told Jay anything. He has no idea. You're the only one I've talked to about it all, except Patti, but it's not the same. She learned the basics from the nun at the convent where I was born.” “You were born in a convent,” he stated. “Yes.” “Naturally.
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Evil (Sweet, #1))
He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which--having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles--he found inaccurate and boring.
Susan Cooper (The Boggart)
On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
Ah. And then you kill him." "No," Arkwright replied patiently. "We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{...}
Rick Yancey (The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist, #3))
I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less… deterministic.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see- Thy walls defaced thy mouldering shines removed- by british hands, which it had best behoved- to guard those relics ne'er to be restored. Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,- And once again thy hapless bossom gored- and snatch'd shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred.
Lord Byron
In the November 1940 week of nightmares, when mighty German planes bombed London, British bombers retaliated by attacking Berlin, where the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, was pressing Hitler for an answer to just exactly when German forces would invade the British Isles. We had heard of the conference beforehand,' Churchill told Parliament, ' and, although not invited to join in the discussion, did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.
William Stevenson (Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II)
As he followed Wood, Jury thought: one disappearance, two auto accident victims, one in a mental institution, one drowned. One murdered. Rackmoor, for all its bracing sea air, didn’t seem the healthiest place in the British Isles.
Martha Grimes (The Old Fox Deceiv'd (Richard Jury #2))
in 3000 b.c....in spain, france, the british isles and old europe, the lives of people centered on nature and motherhood. they honored mother nature, mother earth and mother creator. women were revered as the givers of life. as creators, they were thought to be connected to diety. statues of the goddesses of these early people were of full-breasted women with bodies clearly depicting the ballooning abdomen of women about to give birth. these primal people regarded birthing as the highest manifestation of nature. when a woman gave birth, everyone gathered around her in the temple for the "celebration of life." birthing was a religious rite, and not at all the painful ordeal it came to be years later.
Marie F. Mongan (HypnoBirthing: The Mongan Method)
The earliest witch-trial in the British Isles shows animal sacrifice. In 1324 in Ireland Lady Alice Kyteler 'was charged to haue nightlie conference with a spirit called Robin Artisson, to whom she sacrificed in the high waie .ix. red cocks'.[610]
Anonymous
At Bealltainn, or May Day, every effort was made to scare away the fairies, who were particularly dreaded at this season. In the West Highlands charms were used to avert their influence. In the Isle of Man the gorse was set alight to keep them at a distance. In some parts of Ireland the house was sprinkled with holy water to ward off fairy influence. These are only a mere handful out of the large number of references available, but they seem to me to reveal an effort to avoid the attentions of discredited deities on occasions of festival once sacred to them. The gods duly return at the appointed season, but instead of being received with adoration, they are rebuffed by the descendants of their former worshippers, who have embraced a faith which regards them as demons. In like manner the fairies in Ireland were chased away from the midsummer bonfires by casting fire at them. At the first approach of summer, the fairy folk of Scotland were wont to hold a "Rade," or ceremonial ride on horseback, when they were liable to tread down the growing grain.
Lewis Spence (British Fairy Origins)
From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky,the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smoke stacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells - disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time - gamely making for the British Isles
William Boyd
was the sound of the most beautiful girl in the whole of the British Isles laughing with delight and amusement.
Neil Gaiman (Stardust)
To me, Gothic fiction is the literary representation of the stormy gloom of the British Isles.
Stewart Stafford
Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an “area of war” in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning.
Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.
H.W. Charles (The Money Code: Become a Millionaire With the Ancient Jewish Code)
Coins were first introduced into the British Isles, in large quantities, from Belgic Gaul and Armorica in the period 130–80 bc and soon British tribes began to mint their own. Gallo-Belgic
Barry Cunliffe (Iron Age Britain)
Look, I don't have a problem with medieval Europe. I have a problem with modern fantasy's fetishization of medieval Europe; that's different. So many fantasy writers and fans simplify the social structure of the period, monotonize the cultural interactions, treat conflicts as binaries instead of the complicated dynamic tapestry they actually were. They're not doing medieval Europe, they're doing Simplistic British Isles Fantasy Full of Lots of Guys with Swords And Not Much Else. Not all medieval European fantasy does this, of course - but enough does that frankly, they've turned me off the setting.
N.K. Jemisin
You’re a good man, Cap’n Horn. I know that Miss Willis would be here with you if she could.” “She will be here with me. She’ll be here if I have to scour all of the confounded British Isles to find her.
Sabrina Jeffries (The Pirate Lord (Lord Trilogy, #1))
I hope you didn’t burn up, British Isles! Where would the world be without your epic contributions to culture: Duran Duran, Idris Elba, and Love Actually? Drop me an e-mail, England, let me know you’re still hanging in there!
Joe Hill (The Fireman)
In Anglo-Saxon Britain as elsewhere, slaves were valuable property, worth each about eight oxen; in Ireland a female slave represented a unit of currency, like a dollar or a euro.4 Moreover, slavery in Anglo-Saxon Britain applied not merely to the captives themselves, for slave status could also be inherited, as had been the case among the Thracians of antiquity. We cannot know how many of the British poor sold themselves and their children into bondage, but the number must have been significant, for attempts at reform were made repeatedly. Kings Alfred the Great and Canute (1014–35) tried, with uncertain success, to restrict slavery, especially with regard to daughters. Nonetheless, about one-tenth of the eleventh-century British population is estimated to have been enslaved, a proportion rising to one-fifth in the West Country.5 So embedded were slaves in the economy of the British Isles that the Catholic Church, quite a wealthy institution, owned vast numbers of them.6
Nell Irvin Painter (The History of White People)
As if to proclaim his home a British Isle unto itself, Teabing had not only posted his signs in English, but he had installed his gate’s intercom entry system on the right-hand side of the truck—the passenger’s side everywhere in Europe except England.
Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
We weather the vagaries of history, welcoming new rulers and bending knees to those in power, whoever they may be. We are a tool of the nation, an asset of the British Isles. Those who work within the Checquy can accomplish what no one else can, and so they are the secret arm of the kingdom.
Daniel O'Malley (The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1))
I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountains, where he has been charged to slay the Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world.
Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places)
The Atonist nobility knew it was impossible to organize and control a worldwide empire from Britain. The British Isles were geographically too far West for effective management. In order to be closer to the “markets,” the Atonist corporate executives coveted Rome. Additionally, by way of their armed Templar branch and incessant murderous “Crusades,” they succeeded making inroads further east. Their double-headed eagle of control reigned over Eastern and Western hemispheres. The seats of Druidic learning once existed in the majority of lands, and so the Atonist or Christian system spread out in similar fashion. Its agents were sent from Britain and Rome to many a region and for many a dark purpose. To this very day, the nobility of Europe and the east are controlled from London and Rome. Nothing has changed when it comes to the dominion of Aton. As Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe have proven, the Culdean monks, of whom we write, had been hired for generations as tutors to elite families throughout Europe. In their book The Knights Templar Revealed, the authors highlight the role played by Culdean adepts tutoring the super-wealthy and influential Catholic dynasties of Burgundy, Champagne and Lorraine, France. Research into the Templars and their affiliated “Salt Line” dynasties reveals that the seven great Crusades were not instigated and participated in for the reasons mentioned in most official history books. As we show here, the Templars were the military wing of British and European Atonists. It was their job to conquer lands, slaughter rivals and rebuild the so-called “Temple of Solomon” or, more correctly, Akhenaton’s New World Order. After its creation, the story of Jesus was transplanted from Britain, where it was invented, to Galilee and Judea. This was done so Christianity would not appear to be conspicuously Druidic in complexion. To conceive Christianity in Britain was one thing; to birth it there was another. The Atonists knew their warped religion was based on ancient Amenism and Druidism. They knew their Jesus, Iesus or Yeshua, was based on Druidic Iesa or Iusa, and that a good many educated people throughout the world knew it also. Their difficulty concerned how to come up with a believable king of light sufficiently appealing to the world’s many pagan nations. Their employees, such as St. Paul (Josephus Piso), were allowed to plunder the archive of the pagans. They were instructed to draw from the canon of stellar gnosis and ancient solar theologies of Egypt, Chaldea and Ireland. The archetypal elements would, like ingredients, simply be tossed about and rearranged and, most importantly, the territory of the new godman would be resituated to suit the meta plan.
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
Collingwood Ingram was a cherry-tree colossus. A passionate advocate for the blossoms and a leading authority on them, he saved some varieties from extinction. He built the world’s biggest collection of cherry-tree varieties outside Japan in his Kent garden. His broader legacy was to spread a diverse cherry-tree culture almost single-handedly across the British Isles and the world at large.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
You can't reveal to me that you're Folk---it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world. Isn't that it? I've heard of that---yes, that account of the Gallic changeling. And isn't it a peripheral motif within the Ulster Cycle?* * There are, in fact, several stories from France and the British Isles which describe this sort of enchantment. In two of the Irish tales, which may have the same root story, a mortal maiden figures out that her suitor is an exile of the courtly fae after he inadvertently touches her crucifix and burns himself (the Folk in Irish stories are often burning themselves on crucifixes, for some reason). She announces it aloud, which breaks the enchantment and allows him henceforth to reveal his faerie nature to whomever he chooses.
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
In the distant past the British Isles were ruled by tribes of giants. In the north, in the highlands of Scotland, in what is now Ross-shire, lived such a tribe of giant beings. This primeval tribe was renowned for their strength, and was famous for its incredible kinsfolk, such as Gog-Magog and the Cailleach-Mhore (Great Cailleach). This Cailleach was famed for her strength, even amongst this mightily-hewed tribe. One day, Cailleach Mhore was walking over the hills with a pannier of earth and rocks on her back. Pausing for breath, she stopped and stood on the site of Ben-Vaichard. As she stood gazing around her, the pannier gave way and all its contents came pouring out. Amidst the noise and chaos the Cailleach-Mhore cursed as her load was scattered. When the dust had cleared her gaze passed over a completely new landscape, with new hills formed by the earth and rocks she had been carrying.
Sorita d'Este (Visions of the Cailleach: Exploring the Myths, Folklore and Legends of the pre-eminent Celtic Hag Goddess)
And what do we do to fit our English-speaking Chinese, our docile and happy, our truly loyal servants, for the Asia of the future? We teach them English history: Henry the VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria, English geography, three-quarters of the book the British Isles, one quarter the rest of the world. literature, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and The Mill on the Floss, all in Basic, as they aren't to know the complexities of our tongue. We cut them from their own learning, their traditions; if that were cutting them off merely from the past, it wouldn't matter, but also and more dangerously, it cuts them from the present, and perhaps the future of Asia. With these happy eunuchs who are bound to us by their knowledge of English we run this country well as our colonial preserve. But we cannot pretend to think we can leave it to them to run it for themselves. All the revolutionaries in India were people who went back to their own literature and language. We'll see the same phenomenon here.
Han Suyin (And the Rain My Drink)
Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.
Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers Series Book 1))
As we stated, after their initial conquest, the Milesians began assimilating the gnosis of their predecessors. Of course they were no lovers of the Druids. After all, the British Druids were collaborators with their dire enemies, the Amenists. Nevertheless, returning to the ancient homeland was a most important step for the displaced and despised Atonists. Owning and controlling the wellspring of knowledge proved to be exceptionally politically fortunate for them. It was a key move on the grand geopolitical chessboard, so to speak. From their new seats in the garden paradise of Britain they could set about conquering the rest of the world. Their designs for a “New World Order,” to replace one lost, commenced from the Western Isles that had unfortunately fallen into their undeserving hands. But why all this exertion, one might rightly ask? Well, a close study of the Culdees and the Cistercians provides the answer. Indeed, a close study of history reveals that, despite appearances to the contrary, religion is less of a concern to despotic men or regimes than politics and economics. Religion is often instrumental to those secretly attempting to attain material power. This is especially true in the case of the Milesian-Atonists. The chieftains of the Sun Cult did not conceive of Christianity for its own sake or because they were intent on saving the world. They wanted to conquer the world not save it. In short, Atonist Christianity was devised so the Milesian nobility could have unrestricted access to the many rich mines of minerals and ore existing throughout the British Isles. It is no accident the great seats of early British Christianity - the many famous churches, chapels, cathedrals and monasteries, as well as forts, castles and private estates - happen to be situated in close proximity to rich underground mines. Of course the Milesian nobility were not going to have access to these precious territories as a matter of course. After all, these sites were often located beside groves and earthworks considered sacred by natives not as irreverent or apathetic as their unfortunate descendants. The Atonists realized that their materialist objectives could be achieved if they manufactured a religion that appeared to be a satisfactory carry on of Druidism. If they could devise a theology which assimilated enough Druidic elements, then perhaps the people would permit the erection of new religious sites over those which stood in ruins. And so the Order of the Culdees was born. So, Christianity was born. In the early days the religion was actually known as Culdeanism or Jessaeanism. Early Christians were known as Culdeans, Therapeuts or suggestively as Galileans. Although they would later spread throughout Europe and the Middle East, their birthplace was Britain.
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
From the foregoing passage, however, it must not be supposed that genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that night) and then lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
Pattee explains there is a basic and extremely important distinction between laws and rules in nature.11 Laws are inexorable, meaning they are unchangeable, inescapable, and inevitable. We can never alter or evade laws of nature. The laws of nature dictate that a car will stay in motion either until an equal and opposite force stops it or it runs out of energy. That is not something we can change. Laws are incorporeal, meaning they do not need embodiments or structures to execute them: there is not a physics policeman enforcing the car’s halt when it runs out of energy. Laws are also universal: they hold at all times in all places. The laws of motion apply whether you are in Scotland or in Spain. On the other hand, rules are arbitrary and can be changed. In the British Isles, the driving rule is to drive on the left side of the road. Continental Europe’s driving rule is to drive on the right side of the road. Rules are dependent on some sort of structure or constraint to execute them. In this case that structure is a police force that fines those who break the rules by driving on the wrong side. Rules are local, meaning that they can exist only when and where there are physical structures to enforce them. If you live out in the middle of the Australian outback, you are in charge. Drive on either side. There is no structure in place to restrain you! Rules are local and changeable and breakable. A rule-governed symbol is selected from a range of competitors for doing a better job constraining the function of the system it belongs to, leading to the production of a more successful phenotype. Selection is flexible; Newton’s laws are not. In their informational role, symbols aren’t dependent on the physical laws that govern energy, time, and rates of change. They follow none of Newton’s laws. They are lawless rule-followers! What this is telling us is that symbols are not locked to their meanings.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
I have no quarrel with the Christ, only with his priests, who call the Great Goddess a demon and deny that she ever held power in this world. <...> Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive in the Holy Isle of Eternity or among the priests with their bells and their death and their Satan and Hell and damnation ... but perhaps I am unjust even to them. Even the Lady of the Lake, who hated a priest's robe as she would have hated a poisonous viper, and with good cause too, chid me once for speaking evil of their God.
Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1))
With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.
Nell Irvin Painter (The History of White People)
A boat, for all its complexity, is in fact a version of simplicity, but of a satisfyingly complex kind. Get to know the hundreds of ways in which a boat-at-sea works and you become its master and commander. A boat provides control in what looks like uncontrollable circumstances. It is the mirror image of the realities of life on land, which look easier but are, psychologically, far more difficult, more subtle, less visible, and less predictable. The boat, in other words, is the haven from the storms at home. And because a boat's workings are a mystery, in the old sense that it is an arcane art, with its own equipment and vocabulary, its nostrums and obscurities from which the vulgar are excluded, it is also a source of potency and seduction.
Adam Nicolson (Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles)
In 2004 the British government’s official advisers, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, proposed that 30 per cent of the United Kingdom’s waters should become reserves in which no fishing or any other kind of extraction happened.58 In 2009 an environmental coalition launched a petition for the same measure – strict protection for 30 per cent of UK seas – which gathered 500,000 signatures.59 Yet, while some nations, including several that are much poorer than the United Kingdom, have started shutting fishing boats out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have managed to protect a spectacular 0.01 per cent of our territorial waters: five of our 48,000 square kilometres. This takes the form of three pocket handkerchiefs: around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. There are plenty of other nominally protected areas but they are no better defended from industrial fishing than our national parks are defended from farming.
George Monbiot (Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding)
Towns like Launceston, Longford, Evandale and other current-day hubs of poppy production in north and central Tasmania had been settled by tens of thousands of British and Irish convicts transported here in the early 19th century as a cheap alternative to prisons in the British Isles. They were followed by thousands of so-called free settlers, who built communities with main streets still lined by two- and three-story pink sandstone buildings.
Anonymous
It is clear, then, that the Amorites of Canaan belonged to the same white race as the Libyans of Northern Africa, and like them preferred the mountains to the hot plains and valleys below. The Libyans themselves belonged to a race which can be traced through the peninsula of Spain and the western side of France into the British Isles.
A.H. Sayce (The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire (Original Illustrations))
one of the only marks the Celt-Iberians left on the British Isles is Stonehenge, which – and the reader would probably agree – is incredibly significant on its own. Interestingly enough, mysterious ancient monuments of the same kind, so-called cyplopean structures, have been found in abundance on the territory of Georgia. Having said that, I absolutely must point out a couple of details, which probably should be duly investigated by experts. One cannot help seeing and hearing similarities between the traditional Georgian gudastviri or chiboni
David Gorji (Georgian Gorgeous or Gorgeous Georgians?)
I am a nomad, son of an ancient line of nomads. The larger part of my family line is made up of the Scots-Irish, a people descended from that peculiar mixture of the Celts of the northern British Isles and the invading Danes and Norsemen. The result was a landless, illiterate, anarchic, and warlike people who were always difficult, if not downright impossible, to govern. They were a race the British Crown rightfully viewed as dangerous rebels,
Eric L. Haney (Inside Delta Force)
Many Vikings joined the armies of foreign princes, and some chieftains achieved high rank. In Western Europe and the British Isles Christianity had to be accepted before any such office could be held and in order to marry a nobleman’s daughter. Religion was the most important cultural distinction between Scandinavians and foreigners.
Else Roesdahl (The Vikings)
A large trencher made of bread was set on the table (one for every two people). One person sliced the trencher and kept half, and the other person used the second half as a plate. Plates are not found in England until the very end of the fourteenth century. Dinner began with a blessing from the chaplain followed by a procession led from the unoccupied side of the lord’s table by the steward who oversaw the staff.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Middle Ages: The British Isles From 500-1500)
Dinner, served between 10:00 A.M. and noon, was the main meal of the day. A trumpeter or crier would announce the meal at a castle. When a guest entered, the ladies would curtsey and take their seats. The lord might give the guest a light, quick kiss before showing the guest to his seat at the lord’s table. Attendants or pages would bring a washbowl forward and pour water for the guest and lord out of an aquanmanile (an elaborate pitcher). The rest of the diners would wash their hands in a lavabo-type dispenser in the great hall and dry their hands on a long towel. They would then take their seats at the lower trestle tables on benches that often served as their beds at night. The diners were served in order: first the visiting clergy, the visiting nobles, the lord and his family, then the retainers.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Middle Ages: The British Isles From 500-1500)
(forks did not appear until the late fourteenth century and weren’t commonly used until the Renaissance).
Sherrilyn Kenyon (The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Middle Ages: The British Isles From 500-1500)
Food in a castle was served in the great hall, a large room usually on an upper floor. The lord’s table was set up along one wall on a small dais, the rest of the tables were positioned in a perpendicular fashion to the lord’s dais. Lower tables were called trestle tables, and when the meals were not being eaten, these tables were taken down and stacked in designated areas. The lord, his guests and family who all sat at the lord’s table were the only ones to have chairs; everyone else sat on a bench. Breakfast was a small snack usually served after morning mass. It consisted of a hunk of bread and ale or cider for the retainers and servants. The lord, his family and guests might be served white bread with a
Sherrilyn Kenyon (The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the Middle Ages: The British Isles From 500-1500)
Assyria had no more prospect of halting the human flow than can the British government stop illegal entrants to the UK, although an effective natural moat surrounds the British Isles. There is little hope that the US Department of Homeland Security will have greater success with its border fence than did King Shulgi of Ur and his successors, whose ‘wall to keep out the Amorites’ failed to prevent the migrants’ eventual takeover of all lower Mesopotamia and their founding of Old Babylon.
Paul Kriwaczek (Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization)
The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
Inscriptions and finds from other parts of Europe have confirmed his name through the variants discovered, however.  An inscription with the name Cernunnos was found at Polenza in Italy, and a variant, Cernenus at Verespatak in Rumania where he is equated with Jupiter.  Other European inscriptions include one to Deo Cernunico at Seinsel-Rëlent in Germany and a Greek inscription at Montagnac in France to Karnonos. Cernunnos is best known in modern times by association with the striking image on the Gundestrup Cauldron.  However the worship of Cernunnos, and indeed his name, came from Gaul, where there were many representations of him.  We are concerned with the British perception of the god and how he was recorded, and for these reasons the most likely representations of Cernunnos would be the unnamed bull-horned gods found around Britain. The Romans encountered Cernunnos first in Gaul, and associated him with Mercury, although Julius Caesar likened him to Dis Pater as the major god.
David Rankine (The Isles of the Many Gods: An A-Z of the Pagan Gods & Goddesses of Ancient Britain Worshipped During the First Millenium Through to the Middle Ages)
By 1929, Congress passed legislation cutting the immigration quotas for many countries, including European nations such as Germany. Soon, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans would be expelled. Those from China, Japan, Africa, and Arabia were given little chance of gaining US citizenship. At the same time, Congress nearly doubled the quota for immigrants from much of the British Isles. Mary, coming from the preferred stock of British whites, would be welcomed at a time when the United States was closing its doors to many others. As
Michael Kranish (Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President)
While working at the Great Library, he grew fascinated by a manuscript left by an intrepid mariner named Pytheas from the Greek colony of Massalia (today’s Marseilles). Beginning around 320 BCE, Pytheas had made several voyages at the far end of the western Mediterranean, including beyond the famed Pillars of Hercules, or Strait of Gibraltar. Pytheas also sailed around the coast of Spain and made at least one trip across the English Channel, including circumnavigating the British Isles. In addition, he gathered what information he could about lands lying still farther west. Pytheas had published his extraordinary voyages as the History of the Ocean (now lost). His account fit none of the accepted conceptions about the shape of the world, and Aristotelian scholars in particular branded him a liar. Eratosthenes, however, instantly saw its value.
Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
Elizabeth had a firm grasp of the issues. She knew that Mary’s death would alter the way that monarchy was regarded in the British Isles. A regicide would give a massive boost to Parliament, diminishing forever the “divinity that hedges a king.
John Guy (Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart)
The druids, the priests of Ireland’s pre-Christian tradition, figure hugely in the Patrick legends, but we don’t know a great deal about them. It seems that an important role of the druid was to serve as a repository of the culture ’s lore and history. According to Caesar, they were also arbiters of justice. Their training, wrote Pomponius Mela, lasted up to twenty years and consisted of memorizing huge amounts of secret lore. They wrote none of their learning down, but passed it orally from druid to druid.9 According to Pliny the Elder, the word druid means “oak-knower,” but this was a false etymology. Still, it does seem likely that the religion of the druids was animistic and included some communication with and through the phenomena of the natural world. Classical writers, including Caesar, described human sacrifice as being part of the druids’ priestly duties. The classical writers aren’t always reliable on the subject of Celtic culture, but there is ample archaeological evidence of human sacrifice in the pre-Christian rituals of the British Isles.
Jonathan Rogers (Saint Patrick (Christian Encounters))
The 1882 Chinese Restriction Act was extended to an even broader act, encompassing a larger “Asiatic Barred Zone,” in 1917. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted the immigration of people from Africa and Eastern and Southern Europe and practically banned the immigration of Asians until 1965. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge said when he signed the 1924 law. Of course, by then “American” included millions of Negro, Asian, Native, Middle Eastern, and Latinx peoples (who would, at least in the case of Mexican Americans, be forcibly repatriated to Mexico by the hundreds of thousands). But Coolidge and congressional supporters determined that only immigrants from northeastern Europe—Scandinavia, the British Isles, Germany—could keep America American, meaning White. The United States “was a mighty land settled by northern Europeans from the United Kingdom, the Norsemen, and the Saxon,” proclaimed Maine representative Ira Hersey, to applause, during debate over the Immigration Act of 1924.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Only the hundreds who left for England and some (but scarcely all) of those headed for Canada did so as free men and women. Virtually all the emigrants to the British Isles wound up in London, where they lived in impoverished communities with few economic opportunities and no prospects for social advancement. Shortly after their arrival, many were persuaded or coerced into emigrating once again, to Sierra Leone this time. Unlike the later colonization from Nova Scotia, this early “Back to Africa” movement was promoted exclusively by whites who wanted to rid London of its people of color. For a host of reasons, the settlement failed. Former slaves from Virginia or South Carolina who had fled to the British army and finally arrived in a land of freedom wound up dying of tropical diseases or being sold back into slavery.
Ray Raphael (A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence)
The Roman invasion of Britain in 43 CE imported the full pantheon of pagan gods and goddesses. In 313 the emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the new Holy Roman Empire. In the ensuing trickle-down across Europe, Christianity emerged in the British Isles as one cult among many – a largely Celtic brew of beliefs seasoned by the sporadic invasions of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Missionaries kept returning to Britain’s Celtic fringes – Cornwall, Wales, Ireland – but inland, where it was more perilous for them to penetrate, the divine family tree became gnarled and tangled, with the pagan gods twisted around the Christian Trinity as an ivy binds itself to an oak. The story of the death of Christ was, in any case, mystically aligned with the older religion, with its depiction of a sacrificed saviour king and the ritual consumption of body and blood. Paganism may have rejected the pantheon of state-sanctioned gods, but it grafted itself firmly onto the Christian gospel.
Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
The British wondered why these young Americans would be coming all the way to the British Isles—where Christianity had prospered for fifteen centuries—to explain to them why and how they needed to scrub up their spiritual lives. They also found Graham’s approach odd. His flamboyant attire raised eyebrows among folks accustomed to seeing clergy in black robes and tab collars. The Graham team surely looked like Americans selling religion the way Americans sold everything else: as a commodity for the taking.
Grant Wacker (One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham (Library of Religious Biography (LRB)))
Give that woman an inch and she takes the entire British Isles.
Sarah-Jane Stratford (Radio Girls)
By 1912, the British Empire had a population of more than 440 million people, of whom only 10 percent lived in the British Isles.41
Thomas Sowell (Conquests and Cultures: An International History)
those parts of the British Isles without the advantage of coal deposits or ports, industrialization was as handicapped as in other countries.
Thomas Sowell (Conquests and Cultures: An International History)
according to the genetics, there wasn’t a point where a group of genetically similar people spread into the extremities of the British Isles and settled into a culture that we now call Celtic. That word is a modern invention of a presumed people that isn’t reflected in Britain’s DNA.
Adam Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes)
Poppy sighs, shaking her head. "You do realize you just connected the two biggest sluts in The British Isles, right, Brandon?" Hope gasps. "I am not a slut. I am simply generous. Call it a gift." "Yeah well, " I laugh. "Kyan's the gift that keeps on giving. Chlamydia will burn for a week or two." Poppy
Nicole Lynne (War Poppy (War, #1))
Serious theological strife and strategic political reversals had confined Lutheranism to the German and Scandinavian lands. Anabaptists such as the Mennonites remained a marginalized, often fugitive, people. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Reformed varieties of Protestantism continued to expand in Holland, Switzerland, the British Isles, and for a time in France. But
Mark A. Noll (Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity)
JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION While history has proven Malthusianism empirically false, however, it provides the ideal foundation for justifying human oppression and tyranny. The theory holds that there isn’t enough to go around, and can never be. Therefore human aspirations and liberties must be constrained, and authorities must be empowered to enforce the constraining. During Malthus’s own time, his theory was used to justify regressive legislation directed against England’s lower classes, most notably the Poor Law Act of 1834, which forced hundreds of thousands of poor Britons into virtual slavery. 11 However, a far more horrifying example of the impact of Malthusianism was to occur a few years later, when the doctrine motivated the British government’s refusal to provide relief during the great Irish famine of 1846. In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” 12 For the last century and a half, the Irish famine has been cited by Malthusians as proof of their theory of overpopulation, so a few words are in order here to set the record straight. 13 Ireland was certainly not overpopulated in 1846. In fact, based on census data from 1841 and 1851, the Emerald Isle boasted a mere 7.5 million people in 1846, less than half of England’s 15.8 million, living on a land mass about two-thirds that of England and of similar quality. So compared to England, Ireland before the famine was if anything somewhat underpopulated. 14 Nor, as is sometimes said, was the famine caused by a foolish decision of the Irish to confine their diet to potatoes, thereby exposing themselves to starvation when a blight destroyed their only crop. In fact, in 1846 alone, at the height of the famine, Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain. 15 The Irish diet was confined to potatoes because—having had their land expropriated, having been forced to endure merciless rack-rents and taxes, and having been denied any opportunity to acquire income through manufactures or other means—tubers were the only food the Irish could afford. So when the potato crop failed, there was nothing for the Irish themselves to eat, despite the fact that throughout the famine, their homeland continued to export massive amounts of grain, butter, cheese, and meat for foreign consumption. As English reformer William Cobbett noted in his Political Register: Hundreds of thousands of living hogs, thousands upon thousands of sheep and oxen alive; thousands upon thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and butter; thousands upon thousands of sides of bacon; and thousands and thousands of hams; shiploads and boats coming daily and hourly from Ireland to feed the west of Scotland; to feed a million and a half people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire; to feed London and its vicinity; and to fill the country shops in the southern counties of England; we beheld all this, while famine raged in Ireland amongst the raisers of this very food. 16 “The population should be swept from the soil.” Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure. (Contemporary drawings from Illustrated London News.)
Robert Zubrin (Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism)
I believe in Winston’s capability if only he were a bit more steady. But you never know what kite he is going to fly next.” More bluntly, a future prime minister said of Churchill: “I think he has very unusual intellectual ability, but at the same times he seems to have an entirely unbalanced mind.” Churchill himself said, “I like things to happen, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.” He might have developed the point a bit further: he liked to make dangerous things happen. Fighting danger, coping with a crisis, served as a tonic, the best medicine for his internal crises—the “black dog,” the moods brought on by chronic depression. The resultant behavior made Churchill seem to many an impulsive and erratic romantic in a depressed and matter-of-fact world whose inhabitants wanted jobs and social security rather than swordplay and glory.
Thomas Parrish (To Keep the British Isles Afloat: FDR's Men in Churchill's London, 1941)
Before Christianity entered the British Isles, the Pagan festival of the 24th of June was celebrated among the Druids by blazing fires in honour of their great divinity, who, as we have already seen, was Baal. "These Midsummer fires and sacrifices," says Toland, in his Account of the Druids, "were [intended] to obtain a blessing on the fruits of the earth, now becoming ready for gathering; as those of the first of May, that they might prosperously grow; and those of the last of October were a thanksgiving for finishing the harvest.
Alexander Hislop (The Two Babylons)
In that case,” Mike said, then turned to Catherine, “is there a men’s room around here anywhere? I really need to go.” “There’s a water closet right around the corner ahead,” Catherine replied. Mike looked confused. “Why do you keep water in a closet? And am I supposed to pee in it?” Catherine tittered. “No, you silly goose. In the British Isles, we call a bathroom a water closet.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School British Invasion)
The beautiful and “talented” proceeded from classic Anglo-Saxon stock, tribes of blond, blue-eyed Angles and Saxons and Jutes who immigrated to the British Isles from northern Europe in the fifth century in search of open farmland and whose descendants now went to the same churches, universities, and clubs that Galton frequented. The others, those inconvenient wogs, amounted to a deadly snake coiled in the garden of his Eden.
Ron Powers (No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America)
After you told me about the shirt cuff, I told you about the time I spilled ink on a map in my father's study." He shook his head, baffled. "It was a rare two-hundred-year-old map of the British Isles," Merritt explained. "I'd gone into my father's study to play with a set of inkwell bottles, which I'd been told not to do. But they were such tempting little etched glass bottles, and one of them was filled with the most resplendent shade of emerald green you've ever seen. I dipped a pen in it, and accidentally dribbled some onto the map, which had been spread out on his desk. It made a horrid splotch right in the middle of the Oceanus Germanicus. I was standing there, weeping with shame, when Papa walked in and saw what had happened." "What did he do?" Keir asked, now looking interested. "He was quiet at first. Waging a desperate battle with his temper, I'm sure. But then his shoulders relaxed, and he said in a thoughtful tone, 'Merritt, I suspect if you drew some legs on that blotch, it would make an excellent sea monster.' So I added little tentacles and fangs, and I drew a three-masted ship nearby." She paused at the flash of Keir's grin, the one that never failed to make her a bit light-headed. "He had it framed and hung it on the wall over his desk. To this day, he claims it's his favorite work of art." Amusement tugged at one corner of his mouth. "A good father," he commented.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels, #7))
hardly academically rigorous, revealed that English breakfast tea was misnamed in several ways. It came from India, Sri Lanka and Kenya, not England. It was imported to the British Isles by the Portuguese, who drank it in the afternoon. A Scotsman popularized its consumption at breakfast.
Jeffery Deaver (The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme #15))
It is a landscape that has a great deal to teach about threats to the unwary and the temporary nature of all but the rock of the Earth.
Neil Oliver (The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places)
Just been me.
Kirill Korolev (Mythology of the British Isles. Encyclopedia)
In Transylvania the keeping of sheep involves constant vigilance and a pack of large and well-trained dogs. The dogs are not for herding but for protection against wild animals. In the British Isles bears were wiped out by the sixteenth century, and the last wolf was said to have been shot by Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel in 1686. But here wolves still carry off sheep by the scruff of their necks and bears tear pigs in half like loaves of bread. As Gregor Von Rezzori wrote in one of his beautiful memoirs of Romania, 'The poetic gentleness of the flowery slopes was all too deceptive in obscuring the wildness of the deep forests.' (p. 221)
William Blacker (Along the Enchanted Way: A Romanian Story)
It begins, in fact, with the closing years of the 6th century AD and the arrival on these shores of Augustine, the Roman Catholic bishop whose job it was to bring the British Isles under the political sway of the Roman pontif. The story is well known from Bede et al how the British Christians who were here to greet Augustine declined his demand that they place themselves under the Roman authority, and were later massacred for their refusal at Bangor, twelve hundred of the finest scholars and monks of their day being put to the sword.
Bill Cooper (After the Flood)
The first was to secure uninterrupted control of the sea-lanes supplying the British Isles, the great future base for the Allied invasion forces, but that had meant the defeat of the U-boat menace, which came only in the summer of 1943. The second was to attain command of the air, not just over France but also over the Reich, and that was properly secured, interestingly enough, only by early 1944.23 The third and absolutely critical prerequisite had been of course the entry of the United States into the war and the commitment by the American government to a Germany First strategy, for only its vast productive power could guarantee that the Allies would be strong enough to push their way into France. Yet there was also a fourth great factor at work, though it was far to the east, namely, the vast Nazi-Soviet struggle that sapped so much of the Third Reich’s resources and was still pinning down the majority of the German Army’s divisions in 1944.
Paul Kennedy (Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II)
On July 10, as the Austrian Foreign Ministry was drafting its ultimatum to Serbia, thousands of British naval reservists began arriving at manning depots, where they were issued uniforms and boarded their assigned ships. By July 16, the Second and Third Fleets had sailed from their home ports to join the First Fleet for the royal review at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On July 17, King George arrived and the First Lord, bursting with pride, presented the monarch with a fleet that Churchill declared to be “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” On
Robert K. Massie (Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea)
this barrier separating southern England from the rest of the British Isles is aptly named Hadrian’s Wall.
Hourly History (Marcus Aurelius: A Life From Beginning to End (Roman Emperors))
When the second stage of Stonehenge was built on Salisbury Plain c. 2700 BC, it could not have been called Stonehenge, which is an English name. The English had not yet arrived. The English language had not been invented. The Plain would have been there; but it could not have been named after Salisbury, since Salisbury itself had not been founded. One may deduce that a year equivalent to 2700 BC once existed; but no such date could have been conceived before the birth of Christ or the concept of a Common Era. There was no country called 'France', and nothing equivalent to it; there was no 'England', and there was no 'Britain', and no 'Brittany'. As yet, there were no Ancient Gauls, no Ancient Britons, and no Ancient Bretons. This holds good even if each of those later communities would owe much to the gene pool of their unidentifiable predecessors.
Norman Davies (The Isles: A History)
Mary was a Catholic, and Cecil’s overriding ambition was to remold the whole of the British Isles
John Guy (Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart)
Mary deplored the lost opportunity. Two women rulers, working together for the benefit of the British Isles,
John Guy (Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart)
Mapmakers of Europe and navigators of the Indies once thought Australian seas washed the isles of gold. Even after navigators had seen the north-west coast of Australia it was named on one map the coast of gold. Unknown coasts were treasurelands; imagination shaped and gilded them. Then slowly Dutch and British voyagers tarnished the gilt, and Australia turned from a land of reward to a land of punishment when Great Britain dumped convicts and guards at Sydney in 1788. The imagination of the ancients had more truth than the knowledge of the moderns, but for two generations the settlers did not know that their prison had bars of gold.
Geoffrey Blainey (The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining)
The wars within the British Isles resumed under Henry VIII, who acceded to the English throne in 1509.
John Guy (Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart)
In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a “Great Mother” goddess, in these islands we were actually honoring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all. How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems — rather, they’re presented to us as folktales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.
Sharon Blackie (Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life)
So it came about that Joanna and I, sorting wildly through houseagents’ glowing eulogies of properties all over the British Isles, selected Little Furze, Lymstock, as one of the “possibles” to be viewed, mainly because we had never been to Lymstock, and knew no one in that neighbourhood. And when Joanna saw Little Furze she decided at once that it was just the house we wanted.
Agatha Christie (The Moving Finger (Miss Marple, #4))
Ronald Hutton in The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles points out that it is difficult to tell whether these were real reflections of the Goddesses, role models for Celtic women, fantasies of the Celtic men, or the nightmarish visions of the Roman explorers or the Christian monks who eventually wrote down the descriptions.
Courtney Weber (Brigid: History, Mystery, and Magick of the Celtic Goddess)
The magics that were born here may have originated in the English landscape but they were informed from the very beginning by different cultures. The Druids were influenced by the Classical world, as was that world by India. Alchemy was influenced by Arabia, Medieval magic by Jewish cabbalism. The Golden Dawn was inspired by German Rosicrucianism, the French Occult Revival, and the religion of Ancient Egypt. Thelema was a result of Crowley’s explorations in Far and Near Eastern religion and magic, which informed Gardner’s Wicca too. For Dion Fortune, Christ, the Egyptian gods and the gods of the British Isles were equally inspiring, and as for Chaos magicians: they would claim the Universe and the world of physics as their inspiration.
Philip Carr-Gomm (The Book of English Magic)
For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far: Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts. Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.
Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
His only human encounter was with Pagan d'Aumesty, one of the Earl of Oxney's more peculiar relatives, who was wandering along High Knock Channel poking vaguely at the sides of the stream with a stick. Gareth halted. "Good morning, sir." "Eh? Oh. You're, uh..." "Gareth Inglis. I came to tea with the Earl in March." "No. No, that's not it." "I beg your pardon?" "I'll have it in a minute. Let me see, you are—" "Gareth Inglis," Gareth said with extreme clarity. "Ah, I have it! You are Gareth Inglis," Pagan informed him. "Are you looking for your father? He's just around here, I believe." "I...I'm afraid he's dead, sir." "Just around here." Pagan gestured in the vague direction of the Isle. "I saw him—now, was it today?" "No, because he's dead?" Somehow that had become a question. "He's dead," Gareth repeated more firmly. "He's been dead for months." "Are you sure?" Gareth dug his fingernails into his palm against the wholly inappropriate laugh that wanted to bubble up. "Quite sure, yes." "Hmph. That seems very odd of him." "I do apologise," Gareth said hopelessly. "We had been discussing my researches. I wanted to tell him about the progress of the project. I wondered why he had not visited." There was a distinct suggestion that Sir Hugo's death was insufficient excuse. "Really, it is most inconvenient. I wished him to assist in illustrating my theory." "What theory is that, sir?" Gareth asked, out of politeness that he was very rapidly to regret, and then stood subject to ten minutes of monologue on Romano-British Mithraic mysteries before he was forced to remember an urgent appointment.
K.J. Charles (The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen (The Doomsday Books, #1))
today. In the lands where my feet are firmly planted. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the question of whether ancient European cultures honored a “Great Mother” goddess, in these islands we were actually honoring a Great Grandmother. Her name in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland is the Cailleach: literally, the Old Woman. There are traces of other divine old women scattered throughout the rest of the British Isles and Europe; they’re probably the oldest deities of all. How thoroughly we’ve been taught to forget. Today, we don’t see these narratives as remnants of ancient belief systems — rather, they’re presented to us as folktales intended merely to entertain, as oddities of primitive history, the vaguely amusing relics of more superstitious times or bedtime stories for children.
Sharon Blackie (Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life)
Instead of focusing so much on what more we would like, we should humbly be looking at what we have and trying to repay some fraction of the debt we owe for all that we have been gifted by the past. Rather than demanding someone or something else to make our lives easier still, we would do better each to shoulder some responsibility for the well-being of this astonishing place in which we live. It starts with having a look around – a proper look. It might even begin with picking some litter off a beach or tending a garden.
Neil Oliver (The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places)
Hopkins decided, that meant that he expected the war to go on. At one point Stalin said, “Give us antiaircraft guns and aluminum and we can fight for three or four years.” He also said forcefully, “They will never get to Moscow this year.” Hopkins found himself agreeing. (Stalin might have spoken even more forcefully, and Hopkins’s conviction might have run even deeper, had the two known that, within less than two weeks, the chief of the German General Staff would note somberly, “The whole situation shows more and more clearly that we have underestimated the colossus of Russia.”)
Thomas Parrish (To Keep the British Isles Afloat: FDR's Men in Churchill's London, 1941)
Pursue my professional happiness with the man who makes me happy. That is why love is my why. Love is the most important thing to me, William.
Aven Ellis (Making Spirits Bright (British Isles Billionaires, #3))
Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.
Niall Ferguson (Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World)
War tore the guts out of the British empire, weakening it in resources and morale. The first major loss was Ireland.
Jeremy Black (A History of the British Isles)
Before the time of Allan and Delair, Comyns Beaumont reviewed the work of Establishment geologists, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz and James Geikie. He exposed their scientific palaver for the nonsense it is, and wrote of the Ice Age theory in these words: What! No Ice Age which came and went, spreading over hundreds of thousands of years as all good geologists proclaim? No smothering ice sheets which enveloped the British Isles and much of the northern parts of the continent, changed the climate to Arctic conditions – although, strangely enough, much of our fauna and flora survived despite it – and compelled all the survivors to flee? No lengthy periods of ice alternated with warm and even sub-tropical climatic interludes? No. Nothing of the sort. There was admittedly a tremendous convulsion of nature, which had the most direful effect upon the inhabitants of Scandinavia, the British Isles, and those in Northern Asia. It resulted in giving us, it is true, bitter cold, tremendous floods, and cruel dampness. That it affected the climate in the north adversely and permanently cannot be denied. It did other things as well. But no Ice Age – (Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) It was an event…sudden, rapid, devastating, and appalling in its magnitude, and destructiveness. It was a celestial impact of an immense cometary body…It rained or distributed rocks, stones, boulder clay, till, gravel, sand, and other material over great areas, utterly obliterating certain parts, elevating others, and entirely missing some regions. It created islands, drowned others, caused immense tidal waves which swallowed up coastal lands, consumed huge spaces with electric waves, set up volcanoes, and swept away cities and largely populated districts almost in a flash
Michael Tsarion (Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation)
Sailing in the waters around the British Isles required a formidable array of skills.
Barry Cunliffe (Britain Begins)
After the fall of Atlantis and Lemuria, the elements of civilization were brought by survivors to the British Isles and Scandinavia, which, along with the Arctic, make up the remnants of what had once been. Due to the devastating after-effects of the Age of Catastrophe, the inhabitants of Britain were forced to vacate their habitats and flee for safety to the eastern climes. They crossed the land-bridge between Britain and Scandinavia, and ventured into lands less affected by the great cataclysm. Southward and eastward they went, taking their customs, religious rites, technology, language, art, music and symbolism. However, because these forced emigrations occurred before the official dates posited for civilization's rise, they have been deliberately ignored. Nevertheless, in 2008, new found evidence revealed that Egypt was indeed colonized by Westerners over fifteen thousand years ago. Wall paintings dating from this remote period have been found in southern Egypt bearing a striking resemblance to those found in the caves of Lascaux, France. As Comyns Beaumont said, this artwork is Nordic in origin. It belongs to travelers from the North-West who desperately sought refuge from the cataclysm that made their own homelands uninhabitable. The races of Egypt, Libya and India knew these handsome visitors as “Men of Gold,” “God Men,” “Good Men,” “Goat Men,” and “Stag Men.” In the Bible they are cryptically referred to as “Edomites” or "Red Men." This title - attributed to early Egyptians - simply denotes sunburn. Red is the color a fair Caucasian man’s skin turns when exposed to intense equatorial heat. It is singular to find a white
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)