Journalists From England

"Taxation, by reducing people's disposable income, removes choices that are rightly theirs...for many people the role of government has sapped from them — one might almost say confiscated — their sense of responsibility towards other people... I believe in the increase in wealth... People need to be motivated... Conservatives believes that the lion's share of what an individual earns should be left with him... We must rethink what provision should be made for the contingencies of life by the State... Spreading the enterprise culture, minimising the role of the State, improving incentives, striving for low rates for personal and corporate tax."

"At the next election there will be a stark choice for the British people. The fundamental issue will be sovereignty: sovereignty of the nation and sovereignty of the individual. Britons can vote to defend it or to lose it... That is clear blue water."

"Brussels is a city packed with people who know what is best for us. People who have never created a job in their lives, of course, but who tell businesses how to consult their workforce, what hours they must work, how much time off for new mothers and how much for new fathers. Their knowledge fills an entire chapter, the social chapter... Without the social chapter we are free; free to write our own laws, free to export, and free to win."

"A [single currency] would mean giving up the government of the UK. No British government can give up the government of the UK. That's impossible."

"If any of you have got an A-level it is because you have worked to get it. Go to any other country and when you have got an A-level, you have bought it."

"They [the British people] realise if we have a single currency we would be a long way towards that [European political union], because if the economic decisions have to be taken centrally that is an important part of the independence and sovereignty of any country."

"Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures."

"Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it."

"Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?"

"I have never eaten a boiled egg, but I have had a soldier or two."

"Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light."

"It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality."

"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."

"Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose."

"Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape."

"I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea."

"The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted - in all senses - disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human."

"These people are not quite an aristocracy. Perhaps they are simply the blogeoisie (pronounced bloj-wah-zee), a dominant class in network society. Or it may be simpler to think of blogs as a feudal system, with respect and links acting as the chief currency. The peasants toil in the low-rank blogs, paying their tithe in LazyWeb projects to the lords of the link in return for an occasional mention from Hammersley or Searls."

"Whatever analogy we choose, one thing is clear - any group with influence needs people outside that group who will criticise it. In the real world of politics and society, journalists do that - proper journalists who know what having principles means, who aim for objectivity while accepting that it is unattainable, and who are open about who pays them and who they work with."

"...there is a strong case to be made for getting someone senior, with a title to match, who can knock heads together about e-government and how it is done properly..."

"As economic libertarians, these people believe that markets should be free, formed by the rational actions of rational agents - who need only to be provided with perfect information about goods and services in order to build a stable economy. As technological utopians, they believe that everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, if technology is modelled on the American dream and the American way. And as opinion formers, they claim no formal power base, operating instead by linking exhaustively to one another."

"Fortunately for them, in the hyperlinked world it is not necessary to airbrush dissenters out of the group photograph. You can simply wait for Google's PageRank to promote the ideas the A-list find acceptable and linkworthy to the top of the page, while the websites of apostates disappear below the fold and out of history. Who needs a memory hole when the world's favourite search engine does the job so effectively?"

"God, whose farm is all creation, take the gratitude we give; take the finest of our harvest, crops we grow that all may live."

"Cricket is the most senior, widespread and deeply rooted of English games."

"The Australia of her book is not merely a setting for cricket but a place of interest, of fun and of new impressions"

"We've got a freaker! We’ve got a freaker down the wicket now. Not very shapely and it's masculine. And I would think it's seen the last of its cricket for the day. The police are mustered, so are the cameramen, and Greg Chappell. And now he's being embraced by a blond policeman. And this may be his last public appearance but what a splendid one. He's now being marched down in the final exhibition past at least 8,000 people in the Mound Stand, some of whom perhaps have never seen anything quite like this before. And he's getting a very good reception."

"The work of an enthusiast who has watched and enjoyed cricket with an eye for detail and for character, for adventure and the human reflection beyond the ropes. It will, I fancy, be read with the same pleasure as it was written."

"As we at all times criticise the Premier for his management of home affairs, call Mr Butler a fool for his Budget, find fault with Beecham's conducting, or Gielgud's performance, can we not, sometimes, say that our cricketers are not quite so brilliant as usual?"

"Now the Englishmen suddenly came to life. Four runs later Harvey received a beast of a ball from Tyson which spat up at him and splashed off his bat to Cowdrey, 104 for 4."

"I have been treated as a freak, rather like the fat lady at the circus."

"Very few reporters in Fleet Street can write on the game with as much observation, sense of scene and character, and knowledge of the things that technically and tactically matter."

"A great cricketer must be an artist and express himself in his strokes."

"'This is the stupidest place I have ever visited,' she said. 'I shall never come here again.' The tall man looked at her in silence and nodded. 'Yes, you will,' he said. 'You won't be able to stay away now that you have come.'"

"The Falcon was forever going wrong. Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang on the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this too helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality. This is something I look for in all machines..."

"Small boys everywhere know that in a fight between Superman, James Bond and the Terminator, James Bond would win. Well, it's the same story in Star Wars. In a fight between the Enterprise, Stingray, Thunderbird 2 and the Millennium Falcon, the Falcon would reign supreme. It just would. The end."

"I have had long soaks in the bath that were more stressful. I have been on tropical beaches that were more noisy. After a while I became so detached from reality that I put on my indicator and tried to overtake the car in front. Sounds fine except for one thing. I was already in the outside lane. I came within an inch of hitting the central crash barrier and to this day I wonder what the chap in the car behind was thinking when he saw a three-ton, £250,000 Rolls-Royce indicate, to show the driver wasn't asleep, and then drive off the road."

"You get the picture. And so did BMW. When they bought the company they could have fitted a new body to one of their 7 Series. That's what Mercedes did to create the Maybach. But instead of wandering around the BMW spare-parts division saying, "What do we want?" the engineers fired up their computers and asked, "What do we need?". Plainly they looked at what Henry Royce and Charles Rolls were trying to achieve a hundred years ago, and thought, "Zis is vot ve must do also." And as a result the Rolls-Royce Phantom is quite simply the best car in the world."

"The Graf Zeppelin was the mother of all airships, 787 feet long and 115 feet high. Imagine Canary Wharf, on its side, floating over your head."

"There is, however, one car company that has never lost sight of its role in the marketplace. Rolls-Royce. Sir Henry Royce, who founded the company back in 1904, really was a one-man quote machine. "Strive for perfection in everything you do." "Accept nothing as nearly right or good enough." "The quality remains long after the price is forgotten." "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.""

"It's no more daunting in there than in a Georgian drawing room. You sit on a supremely comfortable chair- it'd be even better if it were a wingback, I'm surprised it's not- overlooking acres of leather and wood. You're never tempted, as you are in a Maybach, to push a button just to find out what it does. And then having to spend the rest of the journey trying to find which button undoes whatever the first button did. This makes for a hugely relaxing drive. So relaxing, in fact, that you sometimes forget that you're in a car. I did."

"You know, we've a rather warped sense of what constitutes bravery these days. I mean, even David Beckham is called a hero for scoring a penalty. But when you look at VC winners and hear their stories... well, enough said."

"First off, the whole point of airborne troops is surprise: you don't know they're coming until they're there. But because Cain arrived 24 hours after the first wave, the surprise was gone. And to make matters worse, the landing zone was some eight miles from the bridge. So, thanks to some incompetent planning by the top brass in England, the Germans knew that Cain and his men were coming, they knew where he landed, they knew where he was going, and they had the wherewithal to do something about it."

"In order for a car to have personality, an X factor, the company that makes it must be able to take guidance and inspiration from one man, the man who started the company in the first place. This did not happen with the car outside my window, which was undoubtedly built in a jungle clearing by a company that makes cars to make money. No one began Proton or Hyundai or Daewoo because they harboured a dream of making something extraordinary or special. They are just enormous engineering and construction conglomerates that have been told by their respective governments to make cars so that the locals can get off their oxen and get modern."

"The newest Ferrari of them all, the 458, the Italia. The GT3 was good, but nowhen near as good as this... almost nothing on Earth is as good as this... Set that something I've just told, involving Cameron Diaz... and some honey... then it comes that even that isn't as good as this."

"The Flying Scotsman was the first train, ever, to do 100 MPH. 147 tons doing the ton."

"[On the lack of female presenters on Top Gear] The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blond-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian."

"[Reviewing Japanese kei cars in this passage.] Then there’s the styling. Or rather, there isn’t. Any attempt to give these cars a tapering roofline or a curved rear end is wasteful of precious capacity, which means all of them look exactly – and I mean exactly – like chest freezers. And because they have such tiny wheels they actually look like chest freezers on casters. And that in turn means they look absurd. And no one is going to spend their money on something that makes them look foolish."

"I have bought a farm. There are many sensible reasons for this. [...] Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The Government doesn't get any of my money when I die. And the price of the food that I grow can only go up. But there is another, much more important reason: I can now have a quad bike. I have always loved the idea of such things."

"It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more."

"This is a hard job and I’m not just saying that to win favour with lorry drivers, it’s a hard job. Change gear, change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day."