People From London

"A team effort is a lot of people, doing what I say."

"Why, since people must outnumber the minority that comprises the State and its oppressive forces, have they submitted so meekly to it?"

"The world is in your hands, now use it."

"Wait for it, wait for it! Anticipation is half the fun. So I've been told..."

"Stewart Copeland is an amazing drummer. I just wish he didn't think he was amazing. Sting is a lovely bloke. We've become friends. I felt honored to be on stage with him at Live Aid."

"[On his Live Aid appearance with members of Led Zeppelin] They wanted me there early to rehearse the old Zeppelin songs, but I couldn't make it and I told them, "Listen, I know the songs. I know them backward and forward." Well, that day the tempos were all over the place, and it may have seemed like it was my fault, because I was the one who hadn't rehearsed, but I would pledge to my dying day that it wasn't me. In fact, it was Tony Thompson who was racing a bit; he was a bit nervous, I guess. It came off because of the magic of being Zeppelin; but I remember in the middle of the thing, I actually thought, How do I get out of here?"

"I can't remember those words (Lyrics) even when we were on tour."

"I wouldn't blow my head off. I'd overdose or do something that didn't hurt. But I wouldn't do that to the children. A comedian who committed suicide in the Sixties left a note saying, 'Too many things went wrong too often.' I often think about that."

"They're just horrible. Horrible, horrible guys. They're rude, not as talented as they think they are... I won't mince words here, but they've had a go at me personally."

"Past a certain point, the music is no longer mine. It's yours."

"I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord. And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, Oh Lord. Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord."

"Well, if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand. I've seen your face before my friend But I don't know if you know who I am. Well, I was there and I saw what you did I saw it with my own two eyes. So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you've been. It's all been a pack of lies"

"Well, I remember! I remember, don't worry How could I ever forget? It's the first time, the last time we ever met But, I know the reason why you keep your silence up, No you don't fool me. The hurt doesn't show But the pain still grows It's no stranger to you and me."

"Do you like Phil Collins? I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn't understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where Phil Collins' presence became more apparent. I think Invisible Touch was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism. Take the lyrics to Land of Confusion. In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority. In Too Deep is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment. The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I've heard in rock. Phil Collins' solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like In the Air Tonight and Against All Odds. But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist. This is Sussudio, a great, great song, a personal favorite."

"The subdivision you have to do as an incredible drummer who is also the lead vocalist is percussion in itself. On his first ever solo release, he plays what has to be the most iconic drum fill in existence — which is hard as a drummer at any stage of their career knowing that the most iconic drum fill has already been played and you will never be the person to write it."

"Don't mess with my Phil."

"All I want is to be more famous than anything or anyone."

"Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot."

"When I started writing [Citizens], I thought the revolution of 1789 then goes on the skids and turns into the Terror of 1793. But I became more and more alarmed by what happened in 1789, and more and more bleak about what it is we are supposed to be celebrating. It dawned on me that no sooner had the Declaration of the Rights of Man been signed than a law was passed which allowed opening of mail, stopped freedom of movement and had a brutal attitude to who was a patriot and who was not. Then there was the violence. It was not the fact of decapitation so much as the way these people self-consciously understood what you could do with violence, the way violence could construct allegiances. I'm not saying no good came of the revolution. There was the definition of a citizen with equal rights before the law, the emancipation of the Jews and black slaves – these were intrinsically noble. But the way the revolution enacts these doesn't accidentally produce violence. It necessarily produces violence. And if you look at the landscape of France in 1799 with Bonapartist military dictatorship, the balance is unhappy rather than happy."

"I remember we thought that, whatever else happened in the remainder of the century, two traditional issues were going to go away. One was the nation, which was simply going to dissolve because the new realities were international. We thought the story of the nation had come to an end in 1945 in the rubble of Berlin. The second was organized religion—the new world realities would be technological. I've been kicking myself ever since. Religion and the persistence of nationalism have proved two of the most overwhelmingly important issues."

"Landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as layers of rocks... The book [Landscape and Memory] is a celebration of the improbable resilience both of the Earth and of the ability of these cultural contacts to survive the nightmares of late capitalism and late industrialization. I don't want to be understood as some anti-environmentalist, which I am most emphatically not, but I do have an argument with the notion that there is this determined history whereby technological society is necessarily going to mean oblivion for nature."

"If there's one four-letter word that runs through my television history, oddly it is "Rome". Over time, I came to realise that Rome doesn't just come and go in England's history; instead, we have had an extended love-hate relationship with Rome, whether as empire or church."

"Right through British history we see this constant pull between piety and pragmatism, between deference to the monarch as a godlike figure, and a requirement that he runs the business of Albion with practical efficiency."

"Part of me wants to say with Wordsworth: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.' But if you ask me was it worth it, I don't think it was. If you pin me against a wall and ask: 'Schama, do you think more human happiness than unhappiness emerged?' I have to say no."

"Inheriting the acronym from the father figure of radio populism, Rush Limbaugh, Trump habitually dismisses his Republican adversaries as Rinos (Republicans In Name Only). But the gravamen of the charges levelled by Liz Cheney and Chris Christie is that the real Rino, the fake conservative, is actually Trump himself."

"Repeatedly, this reviewer was struck by the interest of Schama's comparisons and the manner in which his vignettes illuminate and advance his themes. His understanding of the human creation of place is profound. Schama has produced a great work of imaginative history and a powerful, yet sinuous, narrative. If this method is at times facile and his arguments or examples sometimes forced, his range is astonishing. Few historians could have written a work of this scope and scale."

"This is the most marvellous book I have read about the French Revolution in the last 50 years. It is beautifully written, with, every now and then, the most wonderful throw-away line. Its importance, in view of all the fuss over the bicentenary of the French Revolution, is that it concentrates very sharply on what the French Revolution was really about: violence and random killing, mostly in Paris... The book is beautifully written, fully illustrated, and throughout enlightened with a great deal of compassion as well as humour."

"This is a book to be read and re-read, to be dipped into again and again and savored, because there is only so much that one can take in at a single reading. The writing style is the finest and most appealing by an academician that this reviewer has encountered in decades. In summation, there is hardly a page that does not contain a sentence or a paragraph that one would like to memorize and to quote. The opening paragraph of the book, in fact, will draw the reader to it like a magnet and keep him or her there to the final page. And that is no mean achievement for any writer in any age!"

"Here Schama is at his best, allowing his imagination to roam in a series of free associations. The stories, as throughout the book, are told with verve, a Dickensian delight in idiosyncracies, and a stupendous ability to engage and entertain the reader."

"It is the profusion of detail, and the rush of his anecdotal style that make his book both remarkable and engaging. We may perhaps learn from him how, in postmodernist manner, we may treat landscape as a text, with an impersonal author, history itself. "The sum of our pasts", he writes, "generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.""

"To be fully MAGA is still to live, 24/7, within a parallel universe, hermetically closed off from the inconvenient intrusion of fact, blissfully captive to a fantastic theology."

"The declared object of deflation was the restoration of the gold standard at pre-war parity. Its actual effect has been to create unemployment by the restriction of industrial credit. By the lever of unemployment it has forced down wages and has thus facilitated the return to gold through the reduction of prices. An incidental effect has been to transfer purchasing power from the workers, whose wages have been reduced, to the bondholders, whose interest has remained the same. It has also doubled the real burden of Debt since 1920, and was largely responsible for the mining lock-out last year, by the reduction in terms of sterling of the money which we receive for coal sold abroad. Deflation, in fact, has been responsible for a sinister catalogue of disasters which can be substantiated in detailed argument that has never yet been rebutted."

"If you love our country you are national, and if you love our people you are a socialist."

"The ranks of the City are now divided. The advanced section, headed by Mr McKenna and Mr Keynes, face the orthodox and reactionary ranks which are led by Mr Montagu Norman and the heads of the Treasury. To the uninitiated it...seems a little unfortunate that the ex-Labour chancellor should appear...to be an ardent supporter of Mr Montagu Norman. It will be little less than a disaster if in this struggle Labour support is accorded to the reactionary elements in the City."

"We propose first to expand credit in order to create demand. That new and greater demand must, of course, be met by a new and greater supply of goods, or all the evils of inflation and price rise will result. Here our Socialist planning must enter in. We must see that more goods are forthcoming to meet the new demand."

"Faced with the alternative of saying goodbye to the gold standard, and therefore to his own employment, and goodbye to other people's employment, Mr. Churchill characteristically selected the latter course."

"That consecrated combination of private interests and public plunders."

"Yes. I think it’s just because I forgot to cut it, and it’s a slightly different colour, so it’s an object of affection or ridicule, depending on whether you’re Steve Mangan or anybody else on the planet. I think your shaved version is very distinguished, incidentally. I wish I could carry it off. Unfortunately all you’d find under here is the FA Cup. My ears are shocking. They can get satellite TV."

"I’d like to tell you that I come from a long line of German aristocracy and that I’m very rich, but actually it’s a very boring explanation. A man called Tommy Tutt married a lady called Jane Rhind, and suddenly I’ve got a very posh name. And then my parents called me Julian, and suddenly I sound like a prospective Tory MP for West London!"

"But on set it is Stephen Mangan, as the comic-grotesque Dr Guy Secretan, who emerges as the true star. With film roles in Festival and the forthcoming Confetti, it can't be long before he's up there with Coogan and Gervais. The rest of the cast are all straight actors, but Mangan is a brilliant improv performer who pushes the script to the very limit with his constant ad-libbing."

"[Fascism] was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly."

"The greatest comet of British politics in the twentieth century...an orator of the highest rank. He produced, almost unaided, a programme of economic reconstruction which surpassed anything offered by Lloyd George or, in the United States, by F. D. Roosevelt...He has continued fertile in ideas...A superb political thinker, the best of our age."

"The resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley did not come as a surprise... I doubt, indeed, if anybody would be able to work with Mosley unless he were prepared to meekly follow him... I never had any faith in the sincerity of Mosley's professions of Socialism. I was always suspicious of a rich man who came into the Socialist Movement and at once became more socialist than the Socialists... My views of Mosley's sincerity were very generally shared by the Labour members... It was felt that he was a man on the make, and was using the Labour Movement as an instrument for satisfying his ambition... If ever Mosley had the powers of a Hitler or a Mussolini he would be more ruthless and merciless, because weaker and vainer, than those two dictators."

"To Jo Grimond he epitomizes the aristocratic bully."

"Mosley was a disciple of Keynes in the 1920s; and Keynesianism was his great contribution to Fascism. It was Keynesianism which in the last resort made Mosley's Fascism distinctively English, though it was not an Englishness which most English pundits were then prepared to recognise, being as remote from the Keynesian thinking as they were from the problems which gave birth to it."

"Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (October 1932) won some important early converts, like Lord Rothermere, publisher of the mass-circulation London Daily Mail. Mosley’s movement aroused revulsion, however, when his black-shirted guards spotlighted and beat up opponents at a large public meeting at the Olympia expedition hall in London in June 1934. Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, at the end of the same month, provoked the departure of 90 percent of the BUF’s fifty thousand members, including Lord Rothermere. At the end of 1934, Mosley took an actively anti-Semitic track and sent his Blackshirts to swagger through London’s East End, where they fought with Jews and Communists, building a new clientele among unskilled workers and struggling shopkeepers there. The Public Order Act, passed soon after the “Battle of Cable Street” with antifascists on October 4, 1936, outlawed political uniforms and deprived the BUF of its public spectacles, but it grew again to twenty thousand with a campaign against war in 1939. Mosley’s black shirts, violence, and overt sympathy for Mussolini and Hitler (he was married to Diana Mitford in Hitler’s presence at Munich in 1936) seemed alien to most people in Britain, and gradual economic revival after 1931 under the broadly accepted National Government, a coalition dominated by conservatives, left him little political space."

"Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was one of the most interesting failures, not least because Mosley probably had the greatest intellectual gifts and the strongest social connections of all the fascist chiefs. As a promising junior minister of the Labour government of 1929, he put forward a bold plan in early 1930 to combat the Depression by making the empire a closed economic zone and by spending (into deficit, if need be) for job-creating public works and consumer credit. When the leaders of the Labour Party rebuffed these unorthodox proposals, Mosley resigned and formed his own New Party in 1931, taking a few left-wing Labour MPs with him. The New Party won no seats, however, in the parliamentary election of October 1931. A visit to Mussolini persuaded the frustrated Mosley that fascism was the wave of the future, and his own personal way forward."

"One would have had to look a long time to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism must not offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme from Italy and the salute from Germany, with the Jew-baiting tacked on as an afterthought, Mosley having actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent followers."

"I heard Mosley speak here on Sunday. It sickens one to see how easily a man of that type can win over and bamboozle a working class audience."

"He was the only English politician who might easily have become Prime Minister as Conservative, Liberal or Socialist."