Search Results

“... great and illustrious exploits were daily performed on that conspicuous theatre by Britons,’ Edmund Burke complained in 1784 with reference to India. ‘We never hear of any of the natives being actors.’ Yet in India, above all, it was these natives who upheld the Empire. The British exploited differences and ancient antagonisms between local ...”

“... This secret source of strength is the absolute omnipotence, the sovereignty of Parliament.’But Edmund Burke didn’t talk like this at all – and yet most of our modern Conservative thinkers fancy themselves as Burkeans. What Burke said was that in making our political arrangements ‘we compensate, we ...”

“... often touched on the long-standing anxiety that trouble in the colonies would come home to roost. Edmund Burke, writing at the end of the 18th century during an earlier imperial crisis, warned that unless Parliament restrained the East India Company ‘the breakers of the law in India’ could become ‘the makers of law in England’. The agents of ...”

“... serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted his calling from a trade into an art’. How did he do ...”

“... to bring about change without bloodshed.’ This is not the only echo in Sir Ralf’s work of Edmund Burke, that great Whig purloined by Tories. The title of the book itself, together with many of the sentiments, mirrors Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which appeared in 1790. Sir Ralf’s book is ...”

“... and the redefinition is there in the News Letter editorial’s ‘new-sprung modern light’, as Edmund Burke would put it. Something is flying off and out of the caked nest, and it’s not crying ‘yarr yarr yarr’. The comfort blanket is being chucked away. On the Shankill Road, the Ulster Independence Centre has a placard saying ‘One Island, Two ...”

“... was ‘answerable to the electorate as well as to Conference’. To Benn this was simply ‘the Edmund Burke belief, absolutely nothing whatever to do with democracy within the Labour Party’. In retrospect, Benn had a glimmering of the flaw in his great democratic campaign. ‘It came to me,’ he wrote in 1987, ‘that the trouble with the 1981 ...”

“... golden age in which a steadily increasing religious toleration, buoyed by the arguments of Edmund Burke, would see the Catholic elite gradually brought in from the cold, creating a new Ireland. It’s an attractive if rather optimistic line of thought that shares much with revisionist accounts of the French Revolution which emphasise the capacity ...”

“... movement from its commercial shackles’, he tells his astonished advisers, sounding more like Edmund Burke than George Bush. On the last Friday of September, in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, he signs the Meliorist legislation, noting that ‘not a cent of tax money was involved’ in their extraordinary campaign. In Washington, Patti Smith and ...”

“... on the page, theorists see only what their pet doctrines allow them to see. Like the belief that Edmund Burke was a reactionary or that an extraordinary number of male Australians are called Bruce, this is now such a received idea that it seems almost indelicate to point out that it is completely false. In fact, almost all of the best-known literary ...”

“... occupation that suited her best. Johnson was soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in ...”

“... before Parliament. The last had been only narrowly defeated; this one was lost by 189 votes after Edmund Burke read extracts from Priestley’s works to the House. The quotations had been put together by anti-Dissenters and were highly selective, but Priestley had surely been unwise to compare the spread of Enlightenment ideals to a trail of ...”

“... on the unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of ...”

“... point, Jim turned to the bench and declared: ‘Your Honour, like Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, I occasionally have difficulties with the English language.’ Peals of laughter around the ...”

“... repel us, they can excite us when they don’t pose a direct threat to our safety and comfort. Edmund Burke said that to empty a theatre one had only to announce that an execution was in progress outside, thus demonstrating ‘the comparative weakness of the imitative arts’. We still contrive to exclude others, and then either hide from the ...”