That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact op...
I think there's a quality of passion to the American actor. I'm certainly attracted to it, and I like to hope that underscoring it is a characteristic of my work. That quality is certainly also present in some British actors, but I tend to feel the m...
I'm quite British in the sense of not expressing my emotions much. I save it for my songs. If you ask about a death in the family, or a lover, I will not be emotional. I'd probably answer with a smile. Because that's what we British blokes do.
Obviously it's my second senior event, and I'm tired obviously coming back from the British Open, from surgery, which was priority No. 1, did that successfully, and each week since the British Open I've felt in pretty good control of my golf game.
I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
They're very harsh people, the British: hard to impress, very tough on each other, but I rather like that. It's not that the British are more honest - you're just under no illusion with them.
The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.
When I became the chair of the British Film Institute, I didn't understand how much of my time would be taken up with trying to make a case for the British Film Institute: what it's for, why it exists, why it needs its money.
Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for making the Anglo Saxon race but one Empire? What a d...
When I was younger, I was in love with everything about the British Isles, from British folklore to Celtic music. That was always where my passions were as a young girl, and so I studied folklore as a college student in England and Ireland.
More than 55,000 men from Bomber Command lost their lives, of whom 38,000 were British. That's one in 10 of all the British servicemen lost in the Second World War. It beggars belief that there has not been some recognition for what they gave until n...
A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
I just get the feeling that if Jesse Helms was in charge of art in America, you'd go into a museum and see nothing but prints of dogs playing cards.
What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Sometimes darkness is the beauty I am made of—
...look up and see the madness organized in the stars.
Designers shouldn’t design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.
The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
