London

158 quotes found

"30px - Mayor Ken Livingstone, speaking from Singapore, where he had been promoting the city's Olympic bid, called it a “cowardly attack”. Using the media to speak directly to the bombers, he said "In the days that follow, look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people … will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, … because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail." "I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners — black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old — indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for caste, for religion or whatever. That isn't an ideology, that isn't even a perverted faith. It is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder.""

- 7 July 2005 London bombings

0 likesTerrorism in the United Kingdom2005Islamic terrorist incidents in the 2000sLondonBombing
"If the stranger can make his way through the crowd … and can manage to raise himself a few feet above the general level, he sees before him in one direction, by the dim light of hundreds of torches, a writhing party-coloured mass, surmounted by twisting horns, some in rows, tied to rails which run along the whole length of the open space, some gathered in one struggling knot. In another quarter, the moving torches reveal to him, now and then, through the misty light, a couple of acres of living wool, or roods of pigs' skins. If he ventures into this closely wedged and labouring mass, he is enabled to watch more narrowly the reason of the universal ferment among the beasts. The drover with his goad is forcing the cattle into the smallest possible compass, and a little further on half a dozen men are making desperate efforts to drag refractory oxen up to the rails with ropes … The sheep, squeezed into hurdles like figs into a drum, lie down upon each other, and make no sign; the pigs, on the other hand, cry out before they are hurt. This scene, which has more the appearance of a hideous nightmare than a weekly exhibition in a civilized country, is accompanied by the barking of dogs, the bellowing of cattle, the cursing of men, and the dull blow of sticks … The hubbub generally abates from 12 o'clock at night, the time of opening, to its close at 3 p.m. the next day, although during the whole period as fresh lots are "headed up", individual acts of cruelty continue... Many of the drovers we doubt not are ruffians, but we believe the greater part of the cruelty is to be ascribed to the market's place itself which, considering the immense amount of business to be got through on Mondays and Fridays, is absurdly and disgracefully confined."

- Smithfield, London

0 likesLondon
"In the Last Night of the Proms, [[w:Malcolm Sargent|[Sir Malcolm] Sargent]] had bequeathed to the BBC a Janus-faced legacy: in one guise, an iconic national 'tradition' with which the bureaucrats and administrators would tamper at their peril; in another, an embarrassing anachronism which was urgently in need of a makeover. Either way, the result has been that in the forty years since Sargent's death, the issue of what the BBC should 'do' with or to the Last Night has been impossible to avoid, yet also very difficult to deal with. To many, the arguments in favour of change have been and still are overwhelming. The flag-waving of Sargent's Last Night seems to many to be at best an uncomfortable and inappropriate display of deluded and escapist nostalgia, and at worst to pander to the xenophobia and racism of football hooligans and the far right. Meanwhile, and as planned and developed by successive BBC controllers of music, the Proms themselves have become more cosmopolitan and internationalist (with many orchestras and conductors from overseas), more innovative and experimental (with new works commissioned, late night concerts, and an unprecedented range of early and contemporary music), and use more varied locations (among them the Roundhouse, Covent Garden and Westminster Cathedral in addition to the Albert Hall). This in turn means that in recent decades the Last Night has become increasingly detached, both from the country's contemporary circumstances and from the Promenade Concerts as a whole; and when it is beamed and broadcast around the world, it conveys a deeply misleading impression and image of both."

- BBC

0 likesCompanies of the United KingdomMass mediaLondonOrganisations based in the United Kingdom