Those who first cross the Atlantic in a steam-boat will be entitled to a great portion of applause. In a few years we expect such trips will be common ... and bold will they be who first make a passage to Europe in a steam-boat.
When I'm in the U.K. I can't resist Maltesers and Twiglets - the evil combination. Luckily, I live in the U.S. so can't get them easily, which is probably a good thing.
My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.
There is an old guest house opposite my house, and grandsons visit from time to time from the U.S., every time grown up a little. I don't know whether the same grandchildren come every time or it is someone else.
When the Berlin Wall came down, my dad left to visit the U.S. He met my mom at this summer camp where they were both working, so I grew up between Washington Heights and Germany speaking two languages.
When I do go to L.A., it is usually for a reason - to meet with a director or something - but I'm always so happy to go back to London.
I think there's a big market in North America [with travelers] going to Lisbon and connecting over Lisbon.
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
When anybody goes to L.A. from London, there's always this slight sense of, 'What are you doing? Who do you think you are? It's never gonna happen.' It's the classic, good-natured British cynicism.
I was born in London in 1919. I first went to America in 1946 for a three-month holiday. Then I came back, worked here for almost a year sold up my home and went back on immigration in 1947.
Inhabitants flock in here daily, mostly from Pennsylvania and other parts of America, who are over-stocked with people and [some] make directly from Europe; they commonly seat themselves towards the West, and have got near the mountains.
Our children were mostly brought up and educated in the Churchill suburb east of Pittsburgh. Each summer, we took them back to England for an extended period.
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.
My Norwegian wife Aase was a Pan Am stewardess back in the Seventies when we met. She was very attractive, and we became good friends, but I was travelling a lot and she was jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, so it was a while before we got together.
I think people have this idea that I just lived in my place in England and never left. During 'Looking,' I was in America for four years. I've got a green card. I spend half my time there. It doesn't feel like an alien world at all.
It may be no surprise that Pittsburgh has direct flights to London, Paris and Frankfurt, but consider this: many of the tourists here have come from Europe to the capital of culture in the Alleghenies.
And then in 1956 or 1957 my family went over to Europe and I moved over with them, and immediately people in Europe thought my perspective on that issue was 100% correct.
Perhaps because I never left England and went to America - I think the public sort of appreciated that. I visited and I did some shows over there, but I never had any ambitions to settle over there. I could never have left England.
Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack.
Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.
