Linda Colley

Historian

1949-09-13

Quotes by Linda Colley

• It was hardly their own shining abilities alone that allowed a son, two grandsons, and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill to make their way into parliament.

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• America's soldiery, like its war dead, comes disproportionately from its southern states and from its aspiring poor - both white and black.

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• High-level political wives are by no means new. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when patricians dominated British political life, it was common for politicians' spouses to play an active political role.

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• British prime ministers and prime ministers' spouses and children are together becoming ever more like first families. They need to be given sufficient resources and personnel to enable them to carry out their shifting roles efficiently, decently, and safely.

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• Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.

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• Transatlantic flights are unflattering. Hairstyles flop. Makeup melts away. Faces shrivel or swell from dehydration, and contact lenses give way to spectacles.

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• In the past, rulers led their troops into battle and, even in peacetime, called themselves fathers of their people. And modern politics retains abundant masculine rituals. Prime minister's question time in Britain, for instance, is a stylised duel and tournament redolent of testosterone.

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• In Britain, British history is naturally a mainstream subject. Step outside your own narrow specialism, and you can find yourself treading on someone else's toes. But in America, British history is an eccentric, minority pursuit, and while this can be intellectually isolating, it also permits extraordinary freedom.

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• For a very long time, loyalists were often left out of patriotic American histories of the revolution. Or they were caricatured as upper-class Tory reactionaries, or - rather like the Jacobites - made the subject only of nostalgic antiquarianism.

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• The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it.

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• In the U.S., highly selective renditions of its history have served in practice to impose blinkers on some of its citizens and catered to vested interests.

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• The so-called Boer War advertised British vulnerabilities, and these were confirmed by the Irish rising of 1916 and the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State, blows that attracted the notice and attention of colonial dissidents in Asia and Africa.

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• Even at its most powerful, Britain always needed alliances with other European states. There would almost certainly have been no British victory at Waterloo, for instance, without the assistance of Prussia.

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• If the U.S. and its allies can invade a weaker country on the excuse it is abetting terrorism, then why should not India, say, launch a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan on the self-same grounds?

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• Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

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