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“... Linda Colley’s new book is an attempt to discover and analyse the ingredients of British national identity as it was forged in the 18th century – ‘forged’ in the double sense of made up (for communities are imagined and imaginary things) and fashioned in the fire of battle. It is also an attempt to recover and understand the patriotism of ‘ordinary British people’, a patriotism she refuses to regard simply in terms of ideology, or as the result, for many, of variously mediated and unmediated forms of coercion, or as a primarily irrational response by the British to the experience of finding themselves members of the new nation created by the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 ...”

“... throughout the whole extent of the British Empire during the first 250 years of its history, that Linda Colley’s new book is concerned. Stories of captivity, almost always of Europeans at the hands of indigenous peoples, have for long been a staple of North American historiography. The materials are rich, and they offer extraordinary, often unsettling ...”

“... lives. And to write imperial history from the standpoint of the coloniser as victim (as Linda Colley does in Captives, 2002) or to turn the whole business into a peripheral episode in the history of the eccentricities of the British upper classes (as David Cannadine does in Ornamentalism, 2001) is unhelpful. In Castes of Mind: Colonialism and ...”

“... Earlier this summer, a leader in the Times attacked Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Linda Colley for supplying a tendentious, politicised justification for the break-up of Britain. Citing a recent article by J.C.D. Clark, the Times claimed that Britain and Britishness, far from being ‘forged’ largely in the 18th century as ...”

“... became a resource of government rather than opposition was memorably analysed ten years ago by Linda Colley in Britons. David Bell, a colleague of Colley when she was writing that book, now offers a parallel analysis of the French case. It has often been claimed that the French Revolution invented nationalism. Bell ...”

“... of British politics’. The backdrop was reinforced by common or joint Protestant beliefs, as Linda Colley argues in Britons, as well as by imperialism and British state warfare. Only when the former grew less salient and the latter came to be questioned and denounced, as was the case by the 1980s, could it be argued that ‘banal unionism was ...”

“... also mandating that slaves who managed to escape to another state be returned to their owners. As Linda Colley recently pointed out, written constitutions often function as ‘weapons of control, not just documents of liberation and rights’. Certainly this was true of the American example. Overall, the founders of the republic proved unwilling to ...”

“... introductory section on women throughout the centuries – this also would be my responsibility.’Linda Colley, reviewing the book in this paper, thought the book ‘marred by Attallah’s masculine priorities . . . we get page after page devoted to stale questions such as whether women can go to bed with men for lust alone, and whether they are ...”

“... of Charlotte Smith in The Old Manor House (1793). (Writing about these matters in Captives, Linda Colley underestimates the extent to which British perceptions of Native Americans in the period were mediated through fiction.) Among non-fictional accounts, Bage draws on Pierre de Charlevoix, Jonathan Carver and John Long. He borrows material ...”

“... as aggressors but as victims, and here narratives of captivity (such as those retailed recently by Linda Colley) played a significant role. The central figure in these stories was the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, who was killed in his capital city of Srirangapatna in May 1799 by Company forces. After 1800, when there were few such iconic hate figures ...”

“... that anti-Catholicism is one of the most powerful ideological forces in modern British history. Linda Colley, in Britons (1992), argues very persuasively that anti-Catholicism provided the very stuff of a new British identity in the century following the Union of 1707 and, embarrassingly, remained a presence in British politics, not only in Northern ...”

“... second half of the 18th century, as an important tributary of that wider bonding movement which Linda Colley traces so well in Britons, whose effect was to imbue the scattered and diverse island population with a new sense of nationhood. The attempt to nationalise the language in this sense wasn’t in fact quite new, as Mugglestone begins her book by ...”

“... more or less influenced manners in England.’ Yet co-existing with this French influence was what Linda Colley has called a ‘vast superstructure of prejudice’, directed generally against Catholics, but particularly Catholics of the French persuasion. ‘It should flatter us,’ wrote the French novelist Fougeret de Montbron in 1757. ‘Every ...”

“... by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an unruly, half-revolutionary people away from its own past. The defeat of France shored up a potent popular ...”

“... MP, and she could summon the mutes – or in her case the Whips – and destroy him in an instant.Linda Colley, 7 September 2000 Westminster, in Alan Clark’s diary portrayal, was peopled almost wholly by buffoons and crooks. The Laird of Saltwood, it was evident, had no need to spend his days doing what they did: sucking up to Thatcher, plotting the ...”