The English Quotes

“Because the English do not consume significantly more alcohol than other European peoples, this booziness must be something to do with the way in which they drink. George Steiner once told me, ‘You’d never find Sartre in an English café for two reasons. A: No Sartre. B: No café.’ He is right. The collapse of British imperial power produced no explosion of creative thought to match that of Vienna in the dying days of the Habsburg Empire – Freud, Brahms, Mahler and Klimt and the rest – and one of the reasons may perhaps be to do with the lack of a café society. Marxism was a café phenomenon until it gained power.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Outside, on a February afternoon, a middle-aged blonde clatters by, pulling her coat tighter around her. ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’ she says, to no one in particular. There is a faintly Russian look to her dyed hair, with the roots showing black at the parting, and for a moment I wonder whether the Russians ever tried to infiltrate the Met Office, which is still classified as part of the country’s defence system. But she cannot be Russian: no true Russian would think it worth saying it was cold in February. It’s how things are in Russia in winter. No, the capacity for infinite surprise at the weather is distinctly English.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“What does it say about your society that it admits only those who do not care very much to belong? For a start, it suggests that the English don’t much care to be liked. They prefer the company of other misanthropes. Since no misanthrope worth the name would actually want to join a club, eager applicants must be snubbed.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“There was a general tendency to ascribe almost any irregular or bad behaviour to the French. [...] A tonsil-tickling embrace is still known as a French kiss, as if somehow it would never have occurred to an English person to stick their tongue into another person's mouth if the French hadn't invented it.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“An abundance of other English versions of the Bible had followed Tyndale’s original, many affectionately identified by their misprints – the Place-maker’s Bible (‘Blessed are the place-makers’), the Wicked Bible, in which the seventh commandment lost its ‘not’ and became ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’, the Murderers’ Bible (a misprint for ‘murmurers’), the Breeches Bible (Adam and Eve made themselves trousers), the Bug Bible (‘thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night’), the Standing Fishes Bible (instead of ‘fishers’ standing on the river bank), the Vinegar Bible (instead of the ‘Parable of the Vineyard’).”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“No one thought it odd that at her funeral Elton John should perform a reworking of the song he had originally composed as hero-worship to Marilyn Monroe, for she too was an icon for a secular age and in the end icons of that kind are interchangeable.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Diana’s death was tragic, as any sudden death in the prime of life is tragic. But was it any more tragic than that of any of the numberless thousands of young men and women whose short lives are commemorated on war memorials in every village and town in the land? Diana was beautiful, manipulative, compassionate, and had died enjoying the life of a rich nightclubber. Yet she had somehow become an underdog and you cannot exaggerate English sympathy for the underdog.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The silly slogan used for selling this new country was ‘Cool Britannia’, at which any truly cool person could only wince or shudder: when middle-aged politicians embrace youth culture they always get it wrong.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The moment a Frenchman opens his mouth, he declares his identity. The French speak French. The English speak a language which belongs to no one.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“In a vast open-plan office, notable for its astonishing quiet (in an hour and a half not a single telephone rings), the Oxford lexicographers try to keep track of how the language is changing. Desktop screens flash with messages from lookouts across the English-speaking world, bringing news of new coinings. An informant has contacted them to report what she thinks is the first sighting of the expression ‘bad hair day’. It turns out to have been in a newspaper in Seattle. A correspondent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has discovered a hitherto unknown early use of ‘Maltese’, predating anything in the dictionary. A subdued excitement follows.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“We could start by considering what the English have given the world. And here is the first problem. For the greatest legacy the English have bequeathed the rest of humanity is their language. When an Icelander meets a Peruvian, each reaches for his English. Even in the Second World War, when the foundations were being laid for the Axis pact between Germany, Japan and Italy, Yosuke Matsuoka was negotiating for the Emperor in English. It is the medium of technology, science, travel and international politics. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English, four fifths of all data stored on computers is in English and the language is used by two thirds of the world’s scientists.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“in fact, as a woman, I have no country”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“It takes some believing, but it was not until 1869 that Emily Davies founded Girton as a Cambridge college for women, and when, in 1896, the university came to vote on whether women should be allowed to face examinations for degrees, The Times printed train timetables, to enable London-based graduates to travel to Cambridge to vote against the proposition. The university did not allow women full membership until 1948.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“It followed that if a man was to maintain his position, the woman of the house could not be seen to go out to work. (One consequence of the need to preserve the appearance of prosperity on one income was that the husband and father figure was obliged to work longer and longer hours to earn the means to keep the family afloat, becoming in the process the distant, cold figure of caricature.)”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“If you are Pakistani or Indian you might just as well commit suicide when the team is humiliated; if you’re West Indian, you might feel the world has fallen apart when things go wrong at the Oval. But these are countries where cricket is one of the leading suppliers of national pride. In England, you don’t support cricket teams, you follow them. It’s the game you support, not the team.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“It could produce the most extraordinary consequences, as the life of C. B. Fry demonstrates. The son of a chief accountant at Scotland Yard, he had played in the FA Cup before he left Repton School in 1890 and appeared for Surrey county cricket team in the time between school and university (Oxford, inevitably, and the top scholarship at Wadham College). By the time of his graduation, he had represented the university at cricket, soccer and athletics, tied the world long-jump record at 23 feet 6½ inches, and only missed playing wing three-quarter for the Oxford rugby team because of injury. He managed, in passing, to win a first in classics.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Above all, the system had prized integrity above intellect; ‘learning and cultivation of the mind come last, character, heart, courage, strength and physical address are in the first rank’.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“There is a deep social contract with tolerance and an instinctive distrust of cleverness or eloquence. If the Lord God came to England and started expounding his beliefs, you know what they’d say? They’d say ‘Oh, come off it!”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“To believe that any intellectual position is worth dying or killing for is a leap no English academic could make. It is a cliché that there are no intellectuals in England. It is also untrue. But if you are going to be an intellectual in England, you had better do it discreetly, and certainly not call yourself an intellectual. It does not do to grow passionate about your beliefs or to believe that every problem has a solution.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Once away from home, a good thrashing was accepted as an essential part of the process of turning out a gentleman. The champion flogger was the Reverend Dr John Keate, appointed headmaster of Eton in 1809, who beat an average of ten boys each day (excluding his day of rest on Sundays). On 30 June 1832 came his greatest achievement, the thrashing of over eighty of his pupils. At the end of this marathon, the boys stood and cheered him. It says something about the spirit of these places that he was later able to tell some of the school’s old boys of his regret that he hadn’t flogged them more often.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Authors like Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes engage with metropolitan subject-matter, but the books that sell by the container-load are historical romances. The upper classes may have lost their political power, but they still manage to set the social tone and determine the aspirations of the ambitious.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“How else can one explain the survival of so much that is so utterly pointless – barristers’ wigs, bearskins, an unelected House of Lords, flummeries from the Trooping the Colour to Swan-upping, or archaic-sounding offices of state like Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or Warden of the Cinque Ports? In the end, it gets to everyone: those who start their adulthood in passionate argument for modernization end up dreaming of a seat in the House of Lords.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The sons of those who had survived the horrors of the trenches were marching off to war again, singing, There’ll always be an England While there’s a country lane, Wherever there’s a cottage small Beside a field of grain.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple novel, Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930, even included maps of the nameless village where a retired colonel is murdered in the study. The abundance of 1930s thrillers in which colonels are done to death in picturesque hamlets – the ‘Mayhem Parva’ school of writing as Colin Watson puts it – have a very particular kind of village in mind. It is in the Home Counties, ‘where there’s a church, a village inn, very handy for the odd Scotland Yard inspector and his man who come to stay for the regularly recurring crimes’.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The English at least have the saving grace of being able to laugh at themselves. Which must be based upon a profound self-assurance. Since the performance of the state as a whole has been less than impressive in the last five decades, its roots must be in the individual. The English do not take pride in the achievements of their governments: they know they consist at best of ‘characters’ and at worst of charlatans. If a British Prime Minister appeared on television and began addressing them as American Presidents address their people (‘Mah feller Mericans’ as Richard Nixon used to say) their audience would fall about laughing.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Odette Keun was overcome by the small civilities that punctuated every transaction. ‘The matter, the real matter, with these people’, she decided, ‘is that they are polite … Courtesy, kindness, obligingness, tolerance, moderation, self-control, fair play, a cheerful temper, pleasant manners, calmness, stoicism, and an extremely high degree of social civilisation, these are the adorable things I discovered in the English.’ But they came with a price. A born tendency to compromise meant they were incapable of making up their minds. And worse, they were insufferable snobs.16 (Miss Keun claimed to have stood in front of a public lavatory that proclaimed GENTLEMEN ONE PENNY; MEN FREE and round the corner LADIES ONE PENNY; WOMEN FREE. As she stood gasping at the implications of this urinary caste system, she was comforted to be approached by a policeman who asked if she was short of a penny.)”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘English Traits’ I came across a meteorological explanation of the Englishman’s character. ‘Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him indoors whenever he is at rest,’ he writes, ‘domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.’9 I wondered whether the English weather might really be the key.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn’t write a novel like Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“The most characteristic English statement about belief is ‘Well, I’m not particularly religious’, faintly embarrassed by the suggestion that there might be something more to life. It sometimes seems the Church of England thinks God is just the ultimate ‘good chap’.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People

“But what is perhaps most curious about the English experience is the way in which a belief that they had been chosen by God could have produced a version of religion so temporizing, pliable and undogmatic. After all, orthodox Judaism, which is built upon the assertion that the Jews are the chosen people, is one of the most demanding, prescriptive religions on earth. But there is scarcely anything prescriptive about the Church of England.”
― Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People