Great Britain

Dean Acheson (speech at West Point on December 5, 1962) - Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.

Tim Blanning - The potent triad that supported English national identity: Protestantism, Prosperity and Power.

Charles de Gaulle - Les Anglais sont les Anglais; ce n'est pas notre faute.

Harold James - The British are quite comfortable with ambiguity. The most important single work of British literary analysis in the twentieth century is William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. According to Empson, ambiguity implies the possibility that alternative views can be taken, “without sheer misreading.”

Alan Jay Lerner (in My Fair Lady, 1956) -

An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,

The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.

David Rennie (in The Economist's Charlemagne column, 2007) - France and Britain learned diametrically opposed lessons from the Suez crisis of 1956, in which the United States forced the two waning colonial powers to halt a military campaign in Egypt to regain control of the Suez canal. France vowed never to be dependent on America again, but to build up a rival pole of influence. Britain learned never to allow the strategic gulf with America to grow so large again.

Traditional French sailors song (Au 31 du mois d'août, ca 1800) - Et merde pour le roi d'Angleterre, qui nous a déclaré la guerre. [Audio]