Now the boundary of Britain is revealed, and everything unknown is held to be glorious. Tacitus, Agricola
When Britain first at Heaven’ command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain;
Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. James Thomson, Masque of Alfred, variations
[gentle musical strains] Thank you. Well friends, friends, it is the end of the show. Tomorrow is the end of the year. Let us work with all our might to see that 1975, with the gathering storm of despair ahead, will not be the end of our country. Let us altogether say in 1975 both to the nation, to each other, and to ourselves – for God sake, Britain, wake up! [trumpets sound] Hughie Green, Opportunity Knocks, ITV
Hail, happy Britain! highly favoured isle,
Ane Heaven’s peculiar care! William Somerville, The Chase, 1735
The great Britain including England
Will come to be flooded by very high water. Nostradamus III-70
The land of embarrassment and breakfast. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984
He [the Briton] is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, 1901
Do you not feel that this island is moored only lightly to the sea-bed, and might be off for the Americas at any moment? Sebastian Barry, Prayers of Sherkin, 1991
After all we did for Britain selling corduroy and making it swing, all we got was a bit of tin on a piece of leather. George Harrison
Over two thousand years they would forge a nation, dominate the globe and invent the modern world. This is the story of how a small group of islands becomes the superpower – the British. The British I: Treasure Island, Sky Atlantic 2012
Take me back to dear old Blighty. A J Mills, Fred Godfrey & Bennett Scott, song 1916
Oh thou, that dear and happy isle
The garden of the world ere while,
Thou paradise of four seas,
Which heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With watery if not flaming sword;
What luckless apple did we taste,
To make us mortal, and thee waste? Andrew Marvell
Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain Britain. So conform to it, or don’t come here. Tony Blair
To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British. Oscar Wilde
The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. Winston Churchill
The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right. Quentin Crisp
I think it has something to do with being British. We don’t take ourselves as seriously as some other countries do. Joan Collins
And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day p28
Brunel himself was knocked unconscious and washed all the way back to the tunnel of the central shaft. Great Britons s1e1: Brunel, Jeremy Clarkson, BBC 2002
The Greatest Britain of all time. ibid.
At the heart of this extraordinary transformation is one man: Isambard Kingdom Brunel ... The Clifton Suspension Bridge ... The Great Western Railway … the Bristol & Exeter Railway … Taft Vale … South Devon … Cornwell … the Bristol & Gloucester ... Brunel built modern Britain. ibid.
Enormously bold and heady engineering ... He combined form and function to completely transform our landscape. ibid.
He realised he was running the greatest show on Earth. ibid.
He wanted to give Bristol something exotic ... Ancient Egypt – so that was the route he took. Designing it was one thing, but building it was something else. ibid.
Brunel was left dangling two hundred feet above Avon ... He had cheated death for a second time. ibid.
In London he was building another suspension bridge over the Thames, the tunnel underneath it was inching along, he was also doing the docks in Sunderland, designing his first ship, and he got married … ibid.
He began work on what was to become the Great Western Railway. ibid.
Brunel wanted his tracks seven feet apart ... The larger the wheel the less the friction ... Fit the big wheels and then put the carriage between them ... A lower centre of gravity, you’ve got better dynamics ... and something that changed the world – more speed. ibid.
A bridge with two enormous hundred-and-twenty-foot arches ... All the experts said it would collapse ... It’s still the widest, flattest brick arch in the world: a beautiful bridge. ibid.
He proposed a tunnel: two miles long ... He built this exquisite, elaborate and very expensive facade but inside it was unlined ... The opening of the Box Tunnel meant a straight and level run from London to Bristol in four hours, thirteen hours faster than the mail coach. ibid.
Brunel’s Temple Meads Terminus. It is impossible to over-stress the importance of the Great Western Railway ... Brunel’s railway changed our expectations, it changed our aspirations, it changed everything. ibid.
Crossing the Atlantic: he’d had an idea, a big one as usual: he wanted people to catch the train in London, get off in Bristol, and then board a steam-ship bound for New York. ibid.
He came up with this the SS Great Britain – the biggest ship the world had ever seen. Not just the biggest either, she was the first ocean-going liner to be made from iron, and the first to have a propeller instead of paddle wheels. ibid.
Everything about the Great Britain was gigantic ... You should see his idea of a spanner! ibid.
On just her fifth trip to New York she ran aground off Ireland ... She was sold ... Dumped on the Falkland Islands ... This was the most advanced ship in the world and look what they did to her. ibid.
A modern propeller designed by a computer in the twenty-first century is only five percent more efficient than this propeller which was designed by a Victorian bloke in a tall hat. ibid.
1843 ... He was still only thirty-seven. The crowing glory of the Great Western Railway: Paddington Station. ibid.
There was an air of indestructibility to everything he built. ibid.
The launch pad for the biggest, more impressive, most astonishing engineering feat probably ever ... the Great Eastern ... a leviathan. ibid.
Brunel has scripted another East End soap opera ... The launch: thousands came, but the ship was too heavy to budge. Brunel felt publicly humiliated. Finally, they got her to float and the problems really started ... On her maiden voyage there were only thirty-eight passengers ... The leviathan became a transatlantic cable-layer. ibid.
Brunel didn’t even live to see the ship sail. ibid.
Darwin told the world where we had come from but Brunel had done something so much more important: he took us to where we were going. ibid.
Hers was a tale of innocence lost; the blonde princess who didn’t triumph over adversity. Great Britons s1e2: Diana, Rosie Boycott
There was no-one to instruct her in the cruel ways of the world she was about to enter. ibid.
Diana was a dreamer; she kept a picture of Prince Charles above her bed ... Her elder sister Sarah even dated Prince Charles for a while. ibid.
When she arrived a letter was waiting for her; it was from Charles’s friend, Camilla, inviting her to lunch. Camilla it seemed knew about the engagement before it was announced. ibid.
On the day of the rehearsals at St Paul’s, Charles took the bracelet he had made for Camilla leaving his bodyguard behind; he wanted to be alone. Diana meanwhile went to her sister’s and told them she couldn’t go through with the wedding. ibid.
July 29th 1981: the great day. ibid.
The press wondered if Diana was anorexic. Psychiatrists arrived in secret at the palace. ibid.
Diana transformed the monarchy for ever, and she was punished for doing so. ibid.
When the Tories implied that she was too thick to understand the complexities of the land mines issue, we said, What complexity? ... She was right, and the law was changed. ibid.
He was the future king, and where do you go after that? ibid.
She showed us that the casket of gold is often worthless. ibid.