Geoff

“Malcolm Muggeridge captured this parting of the ways in a gloomy piece for Encounter: ‘Each time I return to England from abroad,’ he observed, ‘the country seems a little more run-down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier, its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier; the editorial pretensions of its newspapers a little emptier, and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.’29”
― Philip Stephens, Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit

“She had begun petting the Kauraanian kitten, and it purred like it wanted to be a starship engine when it grew up.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“There’s an all-too-common assumption that “non-religious” means “not adhering to the tenets of a specific religious sect.” If you aren’t talking about Jesus, or Allah, or reincarnation — if all you’re talking about is non-specific ideas of some sort of higher power or some sort of afterlife — that’s typically seen to be “non-religious.” Atheism — or indeed, any sort of non-belief in supernatural beings or forces — is still so invisible in our culture that the possibility simply isn’t considered. So even supposedly inclusive, secular events end up with religious or spiritual content that leaves non-believers out in the cold.”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. ‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain