Linda Colley Quotes

On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.

The democratic political institutions of Western countries arose and matured as industrial capitalism matured. It was a time of historically unprecedented economic growth and the concomitant development of new social groupings and relationships. They arose in elite political cultures that were in the main ethnically homogeneous, even if, notably in the American case, the society at large was considerably less so.

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.

For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to men.

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.

To be English and long secretly for Prince Philip's heyday is, at least partly, to be wistful for a fairer, more meritocratic land where jobs were for life and social mobility was real.

I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.

I grew up in a village after the war, and in the village, there were almost only women.

I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.

We know that the British public are obsessed with class.

Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

The old Establishment has always preserved its position by not being too exclusive - it has been wily enough to absorb the up-and-coming and convert them to their attitudes and mannerisms.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot... Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

In the village where I grew up, a lot of girls didn't have a choice of whether to go to middle school. They would get engaged or married and spend their entire life in that village.

I was born at home in rural Japan.

I grew up in a small, rural community, where my extended family were mountain-folk type people, and some were very religious.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

As class barriers tumbled and Britain became a more meritocratic society, young, well-educated Scots were best placed to exploit the new social mobility.

My dad was working class.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

Inequality is partly a marker of success.

My parents were simpletons. Everyday living was a big thing in that small village where I was born. They had no clue about music.

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.