Arts:

"In the context of English history itself, the extent to which a powerful imagination or significant passage of writing can affect external events - can in a real sense 'create history' - is of absorbing interest" -- Peter Ackroyd, Albion, 2002.

"I believe modern art as resistance is headed for the condition of the Unseen. That which is real but not seen has the power of the occult, of the imagination, of the erotic - like Sean's spirit-mask [left by him] at Patrick's Well [in County Kildare], it gives back meaning to the landscape - it abides unnoticed until someone perhaps takes it as a free gift - by its very existence it challenges the world of the commodified image and changes (however slightly) the shape of consensus reality. Even at its most hidden and secret, it exercises a magnetic effect, brings about subtle shifts and re-alignments - and at least in theory, it gives up merely talking about the world in order to change it. Is this perhaps however covertly an authoritarian act? No, not if it were a sharing of meaning, an opening into the field of "delicate tenuities". What if it were rendered completely invisible? Then perhaps we might speak of the presence of spirits, of a necessary re-enchantment too tenuous for the imperial heaviness of the eye - and of a necessary clandestinity. And what if it were to re-appear sometime as sheer opposition to the unbreathing virtuality of a world which is always deferred, always someplace else, always fatal?" -- Peter Lamborn Wilson, Millenium.

"for all these artists, the pursuit of landscape was always more than a quest for phenomena, or the appearances of the natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration of what they saw: often they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision; always they wanted to rupture the surfaces of the given with imaginative transformations. Landscape, for them, was an arena in which the subjective and the objective, the deeply personal and the richly traditional could be mingled in new and previously unseen ways." -- Peter Fuller, Images of God.

"Moonlight, Avebury, 1974 [by Fay Godwin] ... This photograph, in particular, demolishes at a blow the urbanite's notion that the works produced by William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert and the rest of the Brotherhood of Ancients were, even in their own day, an exaggerated form of special pleading in the face of early industrialization; idealized and romanticized beyond relevance to the issues of the real world. For here it all is, not far off two centuries later, the moon and the stone; the flock and the trees; the dwellings tucked down, inconspicuous yet through their occupants vital to the organization, organization in the sense of organic patterning, of everything else present in the picture." - Phillip Stokes.

"What we want art to do for us is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalise the things that have no duration." -- John Ruskin.

Contemporary art:

Englishness:

"You can discuss voting Conservative with your mother, with the waiter, taxi driver, but not with the art world. To say you are Conservative is to say you're a Nazi. It's absurd." -- Gilbert & George, The Observer, 5th May 2002.

"One of the odder social developments of the past 40 years has been the growing sense that there is something decidedly 'off-message' to even admit the fact, let alone celebrate it, that there is a country called England and that, in being of it, one is English." -- William Packer, Financial Times.

"England is the only country apart from guilt-ravished Germany where it is actually shameful to be proud of where you come from. [...] It is impossible to build a coherent nation where all citizens, newcomers and oldtimers are proud to belong if the defining national emotion is shame." -- Anthony Browne in The Observer, 21st April 2002.

"In most towns and cities around the world, three cultures coexist more or less amicably. There's international high culture [...]. There's international pop culture [...]. And alongside them, there's a distinctive indigenous [folk] culture, celebrated in local festivities, and exported as an advertisement for the nation. It has an official place in the school curriculum, and a protected niche on the broadcasting networks, and it is encouraged (and subsidised) by the government. Everywhere except England." -- Mike Sutton, "England, whose England? - Class, gender and national identity in the 20th century folklore revival."