The Angry Island

"“It’s a great English conceit that their past is written in granite, whilst pretty much everyone else’s is written in sand,” he declares. “Having lived this long with the English reverence for the gay pageant of time, I’m always astonished by how little the Europeans make of history and with what ease they will, and indeed can, discard the trappings and links to the past to make way for the convenience and comfort of the present. They seem so cavalier with it, so spendthrift. For the English, discarding the past is like spending capital. Eating seed corn. In England, changing the shape of a telephone box evokes a fury that might be justified by grave robbing.”"