The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen — all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses. George Orwell
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
29,926. I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school – I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet – but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave. ibid.
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. George Orwell, Why I Write p40
There are, indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops – they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
The English are a conscious-ridden race, with a strong sense of the sinfulness of poverty. ibid.
This is a letter of hate. It is for you my countrymen, I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. The men with manic fingers leading the sightless, feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death … damn you England. John Osborne, Tribune 18th August 1961
Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don’t care to,
The Chinese wouldn’t dare to,
The Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta. Noel Coward, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, 1931
The Stately Homes of England
How beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand. Noel Coward, The Stately Homes of England, 1938
We hear all sorts of disagreeable things about England, the unmusical and the inartistic, unphilosophical country. Percell Wyndham Lewis, Blast
The dusky night rides down the sky,
And ushers in the morn;
The hounds all join in glorious cry,
The huntsman winds his horn:
And a-hunting we will go. Henry Fielding, 1707-54, Don Quixote in England
Oh! The roast beef of England,
And old England’s roast beef. Henry Fielding, The Grub Street Opera
Ask any man what nationality he would prefer to be and ninety-nine out of a hundred will tell you that they would prefer to be an Englishman. Cecil Rhodes
If anything shapes a national character, I think weather is the most important thing of all. Martin Amis’s England, BBC 2014
The English feel they are distinct from Europe. ibid.
Football is a tribal sport, it’s a pack acting in concert. ibid.
You were ashamed of ever having had an empire, and that sweetened the pill of decline. ibid.
We'd be letting ourselves down if we didn’t talk about English drunkenness ... key to the national character. ibid.
It’s drowning their sorrows; it’s not celebratory. ibid.
It’s a source of quiet pride. ibid.
He is an Englishman!
For he himself has said it,
And it’s greatly to his credit,
That he is an Englishman! W S Gilbert, HMS Pinafore
For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Ital-ian!
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman! ibid.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
They’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres. Philip Larkin, Going Going, 1974
England, home and beauty. Samuel James Arnold, The Death of Nelson
England with all thy faults, I love thee still –
My country! William Cowper, 1731-1800, The Task, 1785
But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange. Samuel Pepys, Diary 27th November 1662
The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of national character. Peter Ackroyd
Our country. England is at stake. Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror 1942 starring Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce & Evelyn Ankers & Hendy Daniell & Thomas Gomez & Reginal Denny & Montagu Love, director John Rawlins, Sherlock to Kitty
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time. Aneurin Bevan, 1897-1960, Labour politician
29,9There’s a Germanic culture or a culture that has its roots in a Germanic past that’s being invested with new meaning by the native population. So it’s actually Englishness in a sense which is being forged in these mead halls. Dr Neil Faulkner, archaeologist
Most of the people we think of as Anglo-Saxon are British people who had been integrated into an Anglo-Saxon society. Dr Neil Faulkner
Interviewer: Are you English, Mr Beckett?
Samuel Beckett: Au contraire. attributed
England’s not a bad country ... It’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. Margaret Drabble, A Natural Curiosity, 1989
Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles. George Mikes, How to be an Alien, 1946
An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one. ibid.
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home, –
For Christian service and true chivalry, –
As is the sepulcher in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son: