Linguistic ignorance and racial isolation are our greatest national dangers in the new era opened out by the War. We can no longer stand apart from E… - G. M. Trevelyan

In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!

One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. ...the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon... It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. ...it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits.

When Bolingbroke fled to France, Oxford, with the cool courage that was the finer part of his phlegmatic nature, remained to stand his trial. Fortunately the French archives were not available to the prosecution; and the House of Lords, always at this period a moderator of party heats, acquitted him as it had acquitted Somers sixteen years before. In so doing, it served England well, for the use of impeachments against fallen statesmen is unsuited to a constitutional regime. In civilized society men cannot be expected to serve their country with ropes round their necks.