The Arabs were having to give up their land to the Jews. ibid.
Everyone still lives with the consequences of Britain’s presence in Palestine. ibid.
In the last three decades Britain has embarked on seven foreign wars. ibid.
As we made ourselves at home in strange and faraway lands ... how do we live with the people we rule? Jeremy Paxman, Empire II: Making Ourselves At Home, BBC 2012
Singapore: modern Singapore is a creation of empire. It was founded by Britain as a trading post in 1819. ibid.
The British were determined to remain distinct. ibid.
As well as sports there were amateur theatricals ... There were Burns nights and Bridge evenings, dances and fancy dress parties galore. And of course tea on the terrace. The club served British comfort food. ibid.
The Scots in particular left their homeland in vast numbers. ibid.
Native peoples were forced off their land. ibid.
The biggest land grab of all was still to come: Africa. ibid.
The empire offered the inhabitants of a grey damp island in the north Atlantic the prospect of limitless adventure. Jeremy Paxman, Empire III: Playing the Game
Sport ... was one of the foundations of the empire ... The British public school practised two religions: Christianity and Sport. ibid.
On Kitchener’s desert train had come machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. At Omdurman near Khartoum the stage was set for one of the bloodiest battles in the history of empire. ibid.
Spears against machine guns: the result was never in doubt. ibid.
Charles George Gordon – idealistic, reckless and slightly deranged and now very dead. ibid.
Off the coast of China British traders made fortunes from ships freighted with addictive drugs. Jeremy Paxman, Empire IV: Making a Fortune, BBC 2012
This was piracy with a twist ... Privateering. ibid.
The empire had been conceived in robbery but it grew fat on the cultivation of sugar. ibid.
The British didn’t introduce slavery to the Caribbean but they took to it with enthusiasm ... The plantations devoured slaves ... Each estate was its own little tyranny. ibid.
The earliest Britons in India were traders ... With wealth came power: the East India Company gradually took control of huge swathes of the land. ibid.
It was the greed of Robert Clive and men like him that built Britain an empire. ibid.
At one time chintz made up three quarters of India’s exports. ibid.
At the heart of Empire was the City of London ... Britain took the lead in global banking, finance and insurance. ibid.
The story of how Hong Kong came to be British reflects the empire’s often ruthless pursuit of profit. ibid.
There were an estimated twelve million peasants addicted to opium. ibid.
The British grew opium poppies in India ... Opium was making Britain rich. ibid.
The Opium Wars were about to begin ... China had been forced to enter the modern global economy. ibid.
The British continue to ship opium into China until well into the twentieth century. ibid.
The spoils of empire made Britannia rich. ibid.
Rubber was the plastic of the nineteenth century. ibid.
By the 1920s Lancashire’s cotton mills dominated the world market. ibid.
Gandhi was coming to Britain and would visit Lancashire. ibid.
They [India] would demand and eventually get independence in 1947. ibid.
For many British people the empire was all about doing good. By force if necessary. Jeremy Paxman, Empire V: Doing Good, BBC 2012
Two Victorian obsessions: religion and free trade. ibid.
Livingstone was still in the grip of a passion to explore. For almost two years he drove himself on ... He died in Africa. ibid.
John Chilembwe’s upbringing had given him radical, even subversive, ideas. The notion for example that all humanity was equal before God. His mission church next to Livingstone’s estate became the centre of a movement that took for its motto – Africa for the Africans. ibid.
This phrase was pretty widely used – a genius for empire. ibid.
Rhodes was the mavericks’ maverick ... He made his fortune in a diamond town. ibid.
If ever there was a country founded on blood and greed Rhodesia was it. ibid.
Huge areas were governed by handfuls of white men thrown in at the deep end and told to get on with it. ibid.
The world had turned against the very idea of imperialism. ibid.
Mau Mau - their goal was freedom from British rule. ibid.
The authorities rounded up Mau Mau suspects thousands at a time herding them into vast internment camps. ibid.
The sun had most definitely set on the empire. ibid.
The British grew ashamed of the empire and tried to wipe it from the national memory. ibid.
Much of the world is as it is today because of the empire ... It’s a story that belongs to all of us. ibid.
Britain’s greatest engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and East London’s shipbuilders created vessels that were bigger, faster and tougher than ever before. Brunel’s Last Launch: A Time Team Special, Channel 4 2011
A hundred and fifty years ago Brunel created a ship five times bigger than anything that had gone before. The most revolutionary vessel the world had ever seen: the SS Great Eastern. ibid.
Launching such a big vessel proved to be a disaster. ibid.
The only option was a relatively untested sideways launch. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before. ibid.
Having already built two smaller transatlantic steamships The Great Britain and The Great Western Brunel believed it could be done. ibid.
East London shipbuilding had grown into a vast industry. ibid.
So well-built was the Great Eastern that it apparently took two years to dismantle. ibid.
Three million rivets. ibid.
He [Brunel] was constantly pushing the boundaries of what was possible. ibid.
Human error and muddy conditions had caused one slip to be steeper than the other. The ship’s weight was evenly distributed and it stuck fast. ibid.
A time of sex scandals, executions, and codpieces. Tony Robinson’s History of Britain s1e1: The Tudors, Channel 5 2022
In Henry’s reign living in town was going out of fashion. ibid.
The average life expectancy was just 35 years. ibid.
The unsung heroes who really put the great into Britain were just the ordinary folk who had to cope with the most dramatic changes the world has ever seen. Tony Robinson’s History of Britain s1e2: Victorians
Life on the factory floor was cheap, a combination of lethal machinery and long hours meant that gruesome accidents, even death, were never far away. ibid.
Matchgirls like Sarah were expected to work fourteen-hour shifts virtually all of it on their feet. ibid.
The Georgian period was particularly cruel and nasty. In everything from laws to living standards there was a huge chasm between the poor and the wealthy. Tony Robinson’s History of Britain s1e3: Georgians
In those days in England two branches of the Royal Family claimed the throne. On one side the House of Lancaster whose symbol was a red rose. On the other the House of York with a white rose. The Real War of Thrones s1e3: The True History of Europe: The Marriage Game 1461-1483, 2017
On England’s south coast the town of Hastings … the big event that took place in the region nearly 1,000 years ago which changed Britain forever. Rob Bell, Britain’s Lost Battlefields s1e2: Battle of Hastings
Their leader was William, Duke of Normandy. William believed he had a claim to the throne of England. ibid.
The Norman invasion fleet of 776 ships and 7,000 men landed on 28th September 1066. ibid.
Harold Godwinson wanted to be king but he had a problem. Edward the Confessor had already promised that he’d support William of Normandy. ibid.
Norman and Anglo-Saxon soldiers were now primed and ready. ibid.
Halfway through the Battle of Hastings, both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman soldiers stopped for lunch. ibid.