British

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

A lot of my male vocal influences are British - people like David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant.

Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-'70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap.

In 'The Hobbit,' there were British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand actors, and Peter Jackson was adamant that we would all sound like we were from Britain somewhere.

In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.

Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.

Californians don't have that marvelous British cynicism, but then the British can be so patronizing at times.

I did TV for a bit, and somewhere along the line, I started writing a column for 'The Independent' newspaper in England, and now I write features for 'British Vogue.'

It is not polite for a Russian to interfere in British politics.

When I was, like, 10, I decided it would look really cool, so I pretended I was British. And I've been doing that ever since.

I think it would be a problem if Hollywood was casting British actors only as villains, if that were the case, then certainly there would be cause for concern.

In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.

Though Barbados has been independent since 1966, its capital, Bridgetown, still has elements of a thriving British colonial port.

Someday, I'll make a movie with a British accent.

The British fans, they are very festive, they support their people.

I have always felt an excellent rapport ever since my very first concert in Britain at Hampton Court. I have always felt understood. The British understand opera very well.

I don't enjoy British shows as a rule because British audiences are strange.

It was Nick Willing's intention to make 'Hatter' as sarcastically British funny as he could.

In 1973 we moved to the British Isle of Man, and I put my first band together for one year, named Melody Fair.

I am Scottish. I am also British.

The British needlewoman follows blindly where the merchant leads.

I've always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children's-book illustration scene, because I don't work in line and wash.

I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.

You don't expect to get the letter saying, Her Majesty would like to appoint you Knight Commander of the British Empire! It was just a completely overwhelming and exciting day.

My first British film was Gurinder Chadha's 'Bend It Like Beckham,' which was a huge international success.

We are together with the British and Americans because one should fight terror. But we are not going to pay the price for it by endangering Israel and its citizens.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

The United States can tell you all about what's wrong with the British, to say nothing of the Russians.

I guess the most surprising discovery was how long Gandhi remained loyal to the ideal of the British Empire, even in India.

In 1938, I was given a one-year teaching appointment, which was sensational for British universities. This was converted into the usual four-year contract for an Assistant Lecturer in 1939.

About 30% of fresh food is thrown away in supermarkets every day, although they will deny it. British households are throwing an estimated 30% of their food away, too.

I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.

I worked with Michelle Yeoh on my last film, 'Far North,' and her partner is Jean Todt, at the time, he ran Ferrari. So I went as a VIP to the British grand prix.

The British fans are very intense, maybe even more so than fans in the U.S.! They're great.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

In the British Special Air Service, combat fitness is all about running.

I love British humor. It's just so - surreal.

In America, you're just an American. You're accepted. It doesn't matter that you're of whatever race. If anything, I'm British, and that's it. So let's just get on with it, really.

I'd like to helm my own series. Something British.

It's really hard because obviously people label you as a British East Asian actor. And I'm just from Salford, it's where I was born.

So the books have a greater appeal to a British audience, but that hasn't stopped them making best-seller lists in places like Brazil, Japan and at least a dozen other countries.

Once, when a British Prime Minister sneezed, men half a world away would blow their noses. Now when a British Prime Minister sneezes nobody else will even say 'Bless You'.

Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

I spent 34 months on the battleship Alabama, South Dakota-class. I was a gun captain. First we went to Russia for about 11 months with the British convoys. Then we were up in Norway and Scandinavia.

It would be a sad day if we British stopped being cynical, but you sometimes wonder whether we overdo it.

I'm a huge, huge fan of almost everything British. I love 'The Office' - I was a faithful follower of that show before the American version.

When you are suddenly standing in front of a bunch of journalists being asked what it's like being a British Olympic legend, it's a bit much to take in.

I think I must be the only British actor who's played both Stalin and Trotsky. I need to play Lenin so I can make it a triptych.

I'm very excited that my yelling will be featured on the next Evile disc, they're one of my favorite new-ish bands and, in my not-so-humble opinion, the British saviors of thrash metal.

I go out with a lot of British people. Some of them say I sound a little tipsy.

I wanted to work with Mike Leigh. I had my list of British people I wanted to work with, and I wanted to work with David Lynch and Woody Allen.

I am addicted to 'Vogue' magazines, be they French, British - I adore, adore, adore.

I support British designers as much as I can.

I'm getting comfortable with West Coast style, which is more laid-back than British style.

I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles.

There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance, its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.

My thesis was on kinetics studies with the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase. When that was finished, I was granted a British Council Fellowship to work under the supervision of Malcolm Dixon.

British comedy fans go crazy.

I discovered that bone china was a British invention, which had been developed by a pottery sited next to a slaughterhouse - 'bone' china, of course, contains bones, though we are inclined to forget that.

I went being unemployed for three years to being the lead in a British feature in the days when we only made two a year, 1990. It was ridiculous really.

I give no more paroles to British officers.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

When I was in England doing Romeo and Juliet as a child star, I was interviewed by the British press, who are even more vicious and cruel than the Americans. So I have been extremely guarded ever since.

I'd be quite excited to play somebody British.

My parents are Italian and British. They live in Berkeley now - we all moved there four years ago.

No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.

The British love of queuing and discomfort and being bossed around seems to have found a new outlet in the pop festival.

When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person. It's kind of a Warhol thing.

I know the British people and they are not passengers - they are drivers.

British people are surprised that I'm British!

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.

I love the British.

There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.

I've committed myself to serve my constituents in South Shields and I have committed myself to British politics.

I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the 'Harry Potter' books.

If these theatres didn't exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.

There are a few Chinese smuggled in over the borders of British Columbia on the north and Mexico on the south.

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

The British scene in boxing, not just the heavyweight division, is popping.

The British Government and the Irish Government have accepted very clearly the Mitchell Report.

I like 'The Office.' I particularly like the British version with Ricky Gervais. Of course, I liked the 'Seinfeld' show a lot. I thought that was an awfully good show.

Continental directors, as opposed to British and American, tend to be somewhat high-handed in their approach.

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

The British actors I've met and worked with have all been very supportive of each other.

Simon Hale, the British arranger, does all string and wood arrangements on my records.

I don't watch much British television at all. I mean, it's ironic because I used to work in it for years.

I'm a novelist from the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations of British Columbia, both small coastal reserves hugging the rugged shores of the west coast.

I've always wanted to be a spy, and frankly I'm a little surprised that British intelligence has never approached me.

The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian 'parliament' voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity.

I'm really inspired by British style, like Kate Moss and Sienna Miller.

I thought, If people are going to write about what I'm wearing, then I would wear young British designers who need the publicity.

It's very hard to describe your own style. And I'm young, so I'm still experimenting. But I think it's quite British and very much about individuality.

I don't want a tailor-made approach where the British have the best of two worlds. That will be too big an incentive for others to leave and kill the European idea, which is based on shared responsibilities.

If I was British, I would vote resolutely 'remain' because it's in the U.K.'s interest.

My jokes are in my head and I have a duplicate copy of my jokes in a lot of British comics' heads, where they are safe.

For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations.

The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies, but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.

I hope Britain stays in the European Union, but I don't want to decide for the British.

I would like a UK fully engaged in Europe, but I can't decide in place of the British. I see that for the moment they want to be more in retreat.

So I rang up British Telecom, I said 'I want to report a nuisance caller', he said 'Not you again'.

I'm still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent - you get contaminated after so long.

Radicalism is as British as tea and cakes, as much a part of our make-up as monarchy and football. It will never have its own jubilees, palaces or honours system.

England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.

There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands.

When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles, - but never England.

Well British pension funds have not been investing the savings of British people in British infrastructure.

A British declaration be taken against Martinez for 'capturing and robbing us.

I like the fact that I have good old-fashioned British teeth with a big gap.

For over 30 years, the IRA showed that the British government could not rule Ireland on its own terms.

In this context the British and Irish governments will have to promote a new, imaginative and dynamic alternative in which both governments will share power in the north.

Foreign students add cultural value to their British peers, who need an international outlook.

I am certainly not racist, I even like the British.

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany.

There is no cannibalism in the British navy, absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount.

The fact that it's hard to create an original British musical doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

'Up the Junction' went on to inform my love of British social realism. It was the first film I saw of this ilk, a very stark, visceral reflection of England, an England I didn't necessarily feel a part of but that I knew was out there. You could almost smell the bread and butter and cabbage.

Just as the British subject loves England despite her faults, so we must insist that all Germans who were part of the old Germany and helped shape her, recognize the greatness and worthiness of present-day Germany.

But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

That's my family, we have a very British sense of humour, very dry.

I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Nova Scotia as a British colony also came into being as another result of these adventurous British expeditions to North America in the reign of James I.

I've always worked on the fringe of the British press establishment, carving out this niche for myself.

My parents are British but they emigrated to America, where I was born.

I know too much about British politics to comment on British politics.

I really appreciate the British part of my family.

The British claim to have a special relationship with the U.S., but if you mention this in Washington, no one knows what you are talking about.

Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.

I was fat-shamed the other day on a British newspaper. The headline was 'Four Bellies and a Turkey Neck.' They weren't wrong. I looked shocking.

I lived for a year in Scotland. British sign language is very different from American.

It is no longer acceptable in British politics to be fat or eccentric or religious.

British girls are as temperamental as Americans.

The public must suffer untold pangs from the stiffness, the deliberate stifling of emotion, on the part of many British actors.

I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy on the Bund, the city's glamorous waterfront area.

I'm a big fan of British journalists like 'The Independent's Robert Fisk, but it's hard to find voices like his in the U.S.

My unbeaten record and the 10 British Open wins have not been equalled.

Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

I'd like to film a British commercial, they're better than American ones.

British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'

British actors used to be scared of the multi-year options that U.S. TV shows demand. That has changed, because the same is now happening in the U.K.

It frustrates me that Britain can't make something like 'CSI' or 'The Sopranos'. Instead, British TV puts soap in primetime while every other civilized nation leaves it in daytime. Viewers should be more demanding.

When I first did a U.S. pilot season, there were very few British actors schlepping around town trying to get into television. That was 1999.

I'm intimidated by anyone with a British accent.

I'm not as big a soccer fan as people might imagine, being British.

The British, and most European countries, have struggled to accommodate Muslim immigrants, but they have nevertheless welcomed them in large numbers.

British actors behave like Europeans, they are also extremely well trained.

And I definitely do that very British thing of, take things with a pinch of salt, stiff upper lip, you know what I mean?

Further, not only the United States, but the French, British, Germans and the United Nations all thought Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction before the United States intervened.

During school, I'd advertise cars in the University of British Columbia newspaper.

There is an emerging subgenre of British nonfiction in which journalists from 'The Guardian' fearlessly recount their own derring-do in David-and-Goliath battles waged against omnipotent state interests in the pursuit of Big Important Truths.

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

The avian influenza found in mainland British Columbia poses no significant threat to human health.

The British soldiers serving in Afghanistan alongside Prince Harry were in exceptional danger until he was withdrawn.

My father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.

I like the best of the British press. The best of the British press is very good.

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

Well British troops are superb in the field in terms of conflict.

I'm British, pessimism is my wheelhouse.

I'm British, so obviously I repress any powerful emotions of any kind in relation to anything.

The British press are a group of unremitting scumbags. And sometimes they use that scumbaggery to good ends, and often not.

There is so much cross-pollination between the U.S. and Britain in terms of comedians. British TV comedies work well in the U.S. American stand-ups make it big in Britain.

I like dry-to-the-bone stuff. I don't know what it is. I was raised on PBS showing weird British comedies.

There is abundant proof that the opening of our ports always tends to raise the price of foreign corn to the price in the English market, and not to sink the price of British corn to the price in the continental market.

The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.

I have a British and an American passport.

The British press has been unfair to me and the public has followed.

Shakespeare's language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that's all.

The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.

The British cinema had been very dull and conformist.

On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.

When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.

There's a particularly British wariness of appearing to try too hard. It's somehow distasteful. Everything should come to us seamlessly and, if you have to work at it, you're somehow a loser.

I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects, George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household.

Francis Underwood was entirely based on Richard III. When Michael Dobbs wrote 'House of Cards' in the original British series, Richard III is what he based the character on.

I am now a commander of the British Empire.

I'm not going to make general comments about the British press.

I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.

The Cinquecento was an engine of motivation at Fiat. It refurbished the image of the entire company. It's a symbol for the company, but it's more than that. It's a global Italian symbol, as Mini is a global British symbol and the Beetle is a global German symbol.

I seemed to belong to three countries: I had an apartment in Paris, a house in Hollywood, and when I married British theater director Peter Hall, I moved to London.

Before British title fights, I've played football on a Saturday before, it's silly as it is.

Britons seem to have given up on assimilating their Muslim population, with many British elites patting themselves on the back for their tolerance and multiculturalism.

Within two months I made the grand slam: covers of 'American Vogue', 'Italian Vogue', 'British Vogue', and 'French Vogue'.

I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste.

In 1966 I became president of the British Computer Society.

The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American.

L.A. is the opposite of Britain in a lot of respects, and that's what draws so many British people here.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

When I do watch things, they tend to be a lot of comedies. I actually like some of the British comedy series. But, on the whole, I'm not a huge viewer of anything.

It's estimated that by 2030 there will be virtually no unskilled jobs in the British economy.

If athletes are found to have taken performance enhancing drugs, then they should be banned for two years, even if they are British.

And so I was very grateful that I didn't do the British stiff upper lip, but I went straight to a therapist. And she was wonderful and helpful, and I went for about two years.

The British state already invests in early intervention campaigns in drug abuse and sexual health. Challenging extremism should be no less of a priority.

The British and French governments have taken a strong stance against 'extremist content' online when addressing their approach to tackling extremism.

Working on the accent helped, enormously. I will tell you that when I brought Michael a correct 'British' accent, one that my dialect coach was happy with, he hated it.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped to cast off the British crown.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

I see myself as British, and I want to be celebrated by Britain.