British - Historian | September 13, 1949 -
Of course the U.K., and its component parts, should seek out as many connections with as many parts of the world as is profitable and feasible. But to play any kind of global role effectively, the U.K. is likely always to require allies within its own continent, and far more enterprise needs devoting to this.
Linda Colley
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Responding to Britain's future challenges will require unceasing agility in seeking out new alliances and refurbishing old ones inside Europe, not just outside 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 argument that any income redistribution is tantamount to socialism, and that socialism has always been unAmerican, has helped legitimise keeping taxes on America's very wealthy very low.
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Although Britain has, since 1653, had nothing approaching a single, codified constitution, it did for a very long time possess a broad cult of constitutional writing. The Petition of Right of 1628, like the Bill of Rights of 1689, was a cherished text. So, most of all, was Magna Carta.
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Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.
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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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Now, as in the past, rank is closely associated with modes of representation and display: with making an ordered arrangement of people or things visible and evident to onlookers in some fashion.
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Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.
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Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative 'classlessness' of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.
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The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.
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Hillary Clinton is tough, clever, and formidably well briefed, and has been politically ambitious all her adult life.
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