Who Do the English Think They Are? Quotes

“If you were a romantic aesthete back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fond of melancholic, remote, fallen beauty, then here, among the remains of Lindisfarne Priory with its distant view of the island’s crag-top castle, is just the sort of place where you’d tell your friends you wanted to meet your lonely, tragic end”
― Derek J. Taylor, Who Do the English Think They Are?: From the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit

“The world should be thankful that the country took its name from the Angles and not the Saxons. If it had been the other way around – and given the ‘a’ to ‘e’ shifts in Essex and Sussex – the land of Shakespeare and Queen Victoria might have been called Sexland. And what would that have done for English (Sexish?) national identity?”
― Derek J. Taylor, Who Do the English Think They Are?: From the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit