"Insular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unincorporated and unorganized territory of the US; administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, US Department of ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denunciation of Great Britain; and it is usually the untravelled and preeminently insular Briton alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his American cousins. The American, as has often been pointed out, has become vastly more pleasant to deal with since his country has won an undeniable place among the foremost nations of the globe. The ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... outbreak of Anglomania, the best French authors spell English proper names no better, the best French critics appreciate Shakspeare as little, and the majority of Parisians have no less partial and fixed a notion of the characteristics of their insular neighbors, than before the days of journalism and steam. The attempts to represent English manners and character are as gross caricatures now as in the time of Montaigne. However apt at fusion within, the national egotism is as repugnant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... staple commodity for building material in ancient Erinn. Planks and beams, with rough blocks of wood or stone, were most likely reserved for the dwelling-place of chieftains. Such were the material used also for the royal residence in Thorney Island, a swampy morass in the Thames, secured by its insular position, where the early English kings administered justice; and such, probably, were the material of the original Palais de Justice, where the kings of Gaul entrenched themselves in a ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... friend.—Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent—has given you patronage, and me dependence. I would not, for my single self, call on your humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye. I would brave misfortune—I could face ruin, for at the worst Death's thousand doors stand open; but the tender concerns that I have mentioned, the ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... It is with no insular feeling that we express the same sentiment; but, nevertheless, we do feel it to be something to boast of, that our countrywomen will not have to learn the art of Wax Flower Modelling from foreigners, many of whom however have been ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... of suffocation whilst scaling the heights. At the same time Lieutenant-Colonel Don Juan Creagh, commanding the Infantry Battalion, accompanied by a volunteer, Don Vicente Siera, Lieutenant of the local corps (fixo) of Cuba, led thirty of his men and fifty Rozadores [Footnote: The insular name of an irregular corps, now done away with. Literally taken, the word means sicklemen.] belonging to the city of La Laguna. They proceeded across country in order to reconnoitre the enemy's rear. Before nightfall ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own,—a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... turned its eye more to political mechanisms. For this very reason it kept up more of fellowship with the broad world, and had the benefit of this in a larger measure of social fructification. Whatever is separated dies. Quakerism uttered a word so profound that the utterance made it insular; and, left to itself, it began to be lost in itself. Nevertheless, Quakerism and Puritanism are the two richest historic soils of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... statements concerning it. It was some fifty years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution before it began in great bulk, but to-day we find in the States alone forty-six legislative bodies, and two of Territories, besides the Federal Congress and the limited legislatures of our insular possessions. Nearly all of these turn out laws every year; even when the legislatures meet biennially, they frequently have an annual session. Only in one or two Southern States have recent constitutions restricted them ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... than of similarity, as in the case of the Napoleonic epoch, when the causes which drew together the western half of the continent operated powerfully to exclude our own country from the current influences of the time, and made the England of 1815, in opinion, in religion, and in taste much more insular than the England of 1780. The revolution which overthrew Charles X. did no doubt encourage and stimulate the party of Reform in Great Britain; but, unlike the Belgian, the German, and the Italian movements, the English Reform ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... specific: During the latter days of my residence in the Islands in 1905 Governor-General Wright one day told me that he had recently personally received from one of the most distinguished Filipinos of the time, and a member of the Insular Civil Commission, the statement that 'there was not a single prominent and dominant family among the Christianized Filipinos which did not possess Chinese blood.' The voice and will of the Filipinos of to-day is the voice and the will of these brainy, industrious, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... laudable, but the methods she adopted to set the stranger at her ease were not those most likely to endear the insular English to their cousins across the Atlantic. Ida, to begin with, had not only a spice of temper but also no great reverence for forms and formulas, and the people that she was accustomed to meeting were those who had set their mark upon wide belts of forest and long leagues of prairie. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... pretensions.] of having bearded the elite of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of the regular despatches. The government news was generally ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those 'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and too cosmopolitan.'[112] ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... exchanged their clothing for the half-exposed fashion of the native chiefs; and, adopting their pursuits and pleasures, became hunters, and bold fishers in the light canoe. Finally, they learnt to speak the language, as if they had been born in the island; and, at length, sealed their insular destiny by marrying native women. Laonce was hardly eighteen when he was first cast ashore amongst them; but having a handsome person, and those engaging manners, from a naturally amiable disposition added to a gentleman's breeding, which never fail agreeably impressing even ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... estimation will be formed of them if we judge of them by their value to the present generation. Let us consider the importance of his admirable survey of the whole eastern coast of New Holland, showing its vast size and insular character. Not less important was his survey of the islands of New Zealand, which, with New Holland, or Australia, are now among the most valuable possessions of the British crown. He discovered New Caledonia, and surveyed ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... with a good balance of nitrogen and oxygen, plus carbon dioxide, argon, et cetera, was mostly surface water, yet offered polar ice caps and a reasonable land area, as taken in the aggregate, although present in the form of scattered, insular masses. The largest of these, about half the size of Terra's Australia, was a comfortable number of degrees above the equator and had been selected as representative for detailed examination. Briefly: standard terrain—a balance between mountains, desert, and plain; flora, varied; ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... was absent, Knyphausen was at first occupied in making preparations for the defence of that city? for, by the extreme severity of the winter, New York was deprived of that natural defence which arises from its insular situation. The Hudson, called the North River, was so completely covered with thick ice that a large army, with heavy artillery and baggage, might have crossed it with ease, and by that means have approached the very walls of the city. Knyphausen expected ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... principal points on which these negotiations were to be based were compensation for losses and expenses, a friendly and becoming intercourse on terms of equality between officers of the two countries, and the cession of insular territory for commerce and for the residence of merchants, and as a security and guarantee against the future renewal of offensive acts. The first step toward the acceptance of these terms was taken when an imperial commission was formed of three ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... from having considered the peculiar advantages, which this country has enjoyed, passes in rapid transition to the uses, which we have made of these advantages. We have been preserved by our insular situation, from suffering the actual horrors of War ourselves, and we have shewn our gratitude to Providence for this immunity by our eagerness to spread those horrors over nations less happily situated. In the midst of plenty and safety we have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with the domestic type of excellence, in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, Securus judicat ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... what these very colonists were engaged in doing, and for a moment the British officer felt a throb of sympathy hitherto unknown to him. He had landed at New York but a month before, filled with insular prejudices and contempt for these country lads and farmers, whom he imagined composed the Continental army; but the fight at Fairfield, which was carried on by the Hessians with a brutality that disgusted him, and the encounter with such a family as this under whose roof he ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... one were to ask what is the especial strength of England as regards other empires and commonwealths, the answer would be that it lies in her insular position,—in the "silver streak" that parts her from France; and the true Christian is girt ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... Programs, Defense Intelligence Agency (Department of Defense), Department of State, Fish and Wildlife Service (Department of the Interior), National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (Department of Defense), Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Department of Defense), Office of Insular Affairs (Department of the Interior), US Board on Geographic Names (Department of the Interior), and other public and ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... makes a trap for the stranger. One's first impression is that they are entirely soft. Then one comes suddenly upon something very hard, and you know that you have reached the limit and must adapt yourself to the fact. They have, for example, their insular conventions which ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... competition. He gave himself up to the bright warmth like an animal, and forgot. And he became part of the marvellous and complicated splendour of the scene, took pride in it, took even credit for it (Heaven knew why!), and gradually passed from insular astonishment to a bland, calm acceptance of the miracles of sensuous beatitude which civilization ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... his countrymen republicans, but he contributed more than any other man towards inspiring the whole country with the desire for unity. Herein lies his great work. Without Mazzini, when would the Italians have got beyond the fallacies of federal republics, leagues of princes, provincial autonomy, insular home-rule, and all the other dreams of independence reft of its only safeguard which possessed the minds of patriots of every party in Italy and of nearly every ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... however, to the fatal enlightenment of the last generation, the Spaniards it would appear have come off with the chicken-pox, while in the features of other nations the disfiguring variolous scars are but too visible. Living nearly in an insular situation, Spaniards have slept through the eighteenth century, and how in the main could they have applied their time better? Should the Spanish poetry ever again awake in old Europe, or in the New World, it would certainly have a step to make, from instinct to consciousness. What the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... prefigure the grand solution Of earth's municipal, insular schisms,— Statesmen draping self-love's conclusion In cheap vernacular patriotisms, Unable to give up ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... French was of the British school-girl variety, grammatically precise, but with a hopeless, insular accent. After a few attempts Stefan had ceased trying to speak it with her. "Darling," he had begged, "don't let us—it is the only ugly sound ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... characters of it are old friends to that limited public which reads my books in England; their earlier adventures have been told in those previous volumes (and purposely omitted from "Happy Days" as being a little too insular). I feel somehow that strangers will not be on such easy terms with them, and I would recommend that you approach them last. By that time you will have discovered whether you are in a mood to stop and listen to their chatter, or prefer to pass them ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... region of the north-east monsoon,(10) which affects in a marked degree the climate of all parts over which the winds extend. The same monsoon blows over the eastern countries of the continent, but the insular character of Japan and the proximity of the warm current on both sides of the islands give to the winds which prevail a character which they do not possess on the continent. During the greater part of September the northern wind blows, ...
— Japan • David Murray
... quarter, of a league in circuit, upon which the city of Swakem is built; not one foot of ground on the whole island but is replenished with houses and inhabitants, so that the whole island, is a city. On two sides this insular city comes within a bow-shot of the main land, that is on the E.S.E. and S.W. sides, but all the rest is farther from the land. The road, haven, or bay surrounds the city on every side to the distance of a cross-bow shot, in all of which space, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... that a close study of early Italian will teach him "a thing or two" that he did not know before in his own special subject; so that his labour will not be lost, even from that point of view. Then we shall get the authoritative edition of Dante, which I am insular enough to believe will never come from either Germany or Italy, or from any ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion; while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far rasher and more arrogant to declare that ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... is singularly healthy for Europeans as well as natives, although both hot and moist, as may be expected from being so close to the equator. Besides, the Peninsula is very nearly an insular region; it is densely covered with evergreen forests, and few parts of it are more than fifty miles from the sea. There are no diseases of climate except marsh fevers, which assail Europeans if they camp out at night ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Second Neptune of the Ocean, and Edward Stafford our most prudent Ambassador at the Court of France, in order to accomplish great deeds by sea and land. But since by your skill in the art of navigation you clearly saw that the chief glory of an insular kingdom would obtain its greatest splendor among us by the firm support of the mathematical sciences, you have trained up and supported now a long time, with a most liberal salary, Thomas Hariot, a young man ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... that I had received a mathematical education. I was much interested with some quotations from Lyell's Elements in a late Calcutta Courier, especially about the Marine Saurian from the Gallepagos. What further proof can be wanted of the maritime and insular nature of the world during the reigns of the Saurian reptiles? What more conclusive can be expected about the appearance of new species? This point would at once be settled if the formation of these islands can be proved not to have ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... and hidden manner, stamped me as a volatile, flighty creature, who was no more to be depended upon than a feather in the wind; or, as the Italians say, qu' al piume al vento. It is a curious prejudice, and a purely insular one. And sometimes I think, or rather I used to think, that there was something infinitely grotesque in these narrow ideas, that shut us out from sympathy with the quick moving, subtle world as completely as if we were fakirs by the banks of the sacred Ganges. For what does modern literature deal ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... she can never become either eccentric or foolish," Mr. Adiesen said hurriedly; but all the same he suddenly had a vision of his pet growing up to be peculiar, and an old maid perhaps resembling Aunt Osla, or some other of the many spinster ladies whose insular life had ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... the opinion that there reposed in the monastery of Fulda, Germany, an Archetypus which in the ninth century was copied twice: once in a Turonian hand—the manuscript now kept in the Vatican—the other copy written partly in insular, partly in Carolingian minuscle—the Cheltenham codex, now in New York. The common source at Fulda of these two manuscripts has been established by Traube. There is another testimony pointing to Fulda as ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... hitherto attended his arms, contributed to the stupid lethargy of the people. That he who had just subdued the terrible Norsemen, with the mighty Hardrada at their head, should succumb to those dainty "Frenchmen," as they chose to call the Normans; of whom, in their insular ignorance of the continent, they knew but little, and whom they had seen flying in all directions at the return of Godwin; was a ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... disgust, or bellows of derisive mirth. Why? Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it, and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character, but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the male character and that ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... tie was strongest, language and geography together could carry the day, and the continental Norman became a Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong, political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage. Between States of the relative size of England and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... primitive manifestations of the personification of the natural forces which the Celts worshipped. Its historical background, social organization, chivalry, mood and thought and its heroic ideal are to a large extent, and with perhaps some pre-Aryan survivals, not only those of the insular Celts of two thousand years ago, but also of the important and wide-spread Celtic race with whom Caesar fought and who in an earlier period had sacked Rome and made themselves feared even in ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... some such answer, but I shall be just to you in my thoughts, Viscount Medenham. I know you are a brave man. It is not cowardice, but your insular convention that restrains you from facing me on ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... to the king of Spain. Therefore, in weight of metal, which is the first thing, next to brains, we were at least 2 to 1; and in the number of ships 3 to 1, or about 230 to 76. That is the reason why the insular statesmen went to war, if not with greater enterprise and energy, yet with more determination and spirit, than their exposed and vulnerable allies upon the Continent. The difference between them is that between men who ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Shakespeare to penetrate from England into France. The sea is a wall; and if Voltaire—a thing which he very much regretted when it was too late—had not thrown a bridge over to Shakespeare, Shakespeare might still be in England, on the other side of the wall, a captive in insular glory. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to the delicate hand Of the fairest and first in this insular land, But in Patronage Royal delighting; And which now your own feminine fantasy wins, Tho' it scarce seems a lady-like work, that begins In a scratching and ends ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... they made their books, but no man got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the history of civilization. For this the British people had to wait until De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular comprehension. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... to place her heroine in American surroundings. Philadelphia was the scene chosen for her tale; but, having flattered her readers by this concession to their sympathies and interest, the author was still sufficiently insular to doubt the existence of a competent local physician in this the earliest medical centre in the United States. An English family had come to make their home in the city, where the mother's illness necessitated the attendance of a French doctor to ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... the fact that the south-coast of Java had already been circumnavigated by European navigators, VAN LINSCHOTEN did not venture decidedly to assert the insular nature of this island. It might be connected with the mysterious South-land, the Terra Australis, the Terra Incognita, whose fantastically shaped coast-line was reported to extend south of America, ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... clearly manifest. The prospects for the islands were never better, and it is sincerely to be hoped by all who wish well to the human race that Hawaii-nei may long continue to prosper in every way, and to send light and gladness to the peoples of the insular countries which are scattered like lovely gems all over the beautiful ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... was estimated by the number of her Cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. "Paoli," said he, at the dinner table,[1115]" was a great man. He loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and never ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the keenest of observers, noting and satirizing as no one before his time had attempted, or indeed had been able to do, the cant and hypocrisy, the pride and selfishness, the upstart and arrogant exclusiveness, the insular prejudices and weaknesses, which form a part of our national character; but doing this, he loved his countrymen and countrywomen for their finer qualities, and hated the bungling foreigners who presume to caricature them without the barest knowledge of their subject. This is ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a family is very broad indeed, and in his "Northern Family," which is a branch of his "Insular Group," he includes such distinct linguistic stocks as "all the Indian tribes in the Russian territory," the Queen Charlotte Islanders, Koloshes, Ugalentzes, Atnas, Kolchans, Kenes, Tun Ghaase, Haidahs, and Chimmesyans. His Nootka-Columbian ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... granted. The Hurons account for its origin; a speck of earth was fished out of the waters and grew. In M. H. de Charencey's tract Une Legende Cosmogonique (Havre, 1884) this legend is traced. M. de Charencey distinguishes (1) a continental version; (2) an insular version; (3) a mixed and Hindoo version. Among continental variants he gives a Vogul version (Revue de Philologie et d'Ethnographie, Paris, 1874, i. 10). Numi Tarom (a god who cooks fish in heaven) hangs a male ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... treacherous or ready with their knives. The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as the star ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... ourselves; and which certainly deserves all the praise given to it by Cook. I would specially recommend a fine little harbour, some miles to the south of the place, where the captain cast anchor. Our navigation of the 'Passe des Francais' had definitively settled the insular character of the whole of the district terminating in the 'Cape Stephens' of Cook. It is divided from the mainland of Te-Wahi-Punamub[1] by the Current Basin. The comparison of our chart with that of the strait as laid down by Cook will ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... from the masthead. In a short time we came off Cape Frio, a high, barren, almost insular, promontory, which runs into the Atlantic to the eastward of Rio de Janeiro. We stood on, the land appearing to be of a great height behind the beach, till we came in sight of the Sugar-loaf Mountain; the light land ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... was that Saghalien formed part of the Asiatic mainland. But, in 1806, Mamiya Rinzo, a Japanese traveller, voyaged up and down the Amur, and, crossing to Saghalien, discovered that a narrow strait separated it from the continent. There still exists in Europe a theory that Saghalien's insular character was discovered first by a Russian, Captain Nevelskoy, in 1849, but in Japan the fact ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... exciting was the history of Pontack's, a French ordinary in Abchurch Lane which played a conspicuous part in the social life of London during the eighteenth century. Britons of that period had their own insular contempt for French cookery, as is well illustrated by Rowlandson's caricature which, with its larder of dead cats and its coarse revelation of other secrets of French cuisine, may be regarded as typical of the popular opinion. But Pontack ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... graceful speaker, with a strong touch of Oriental flowery forms of speech in his compliments to officials, with an eye that accurately gauges situations—usually in Persia very difficult ones—a man full of resource and absolutely devoid of ridiculous insular notions—a man who studies hard and works harder still—a man with unbounded energy and an enthusiast in his work—a man who knows his subject well, although he has been such a short time in Teheran—this is our British ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... who by involuntarily harking back to the insular belief that the veriest heathen will quake in unison with the British culprit at the mere threat of British law, showed the absolute yarborough she held in this game, the stakes of which she guessed were something more precious than life itself, and in which she ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... you readily gather that I am severely taciturn at a table d'hote. I refrain from joining in the "delightful conversation" which flies across the table, and know that my reticence is attributed to "insular pride." It is really and truly nothing but impatience of commonplace. I thoroughly enjoy good talk; but, ask yourself, what are the probabilities of hearing that rare thing in the casual assemblage of forty or fifty people, not brought together by any natural affinities or interests, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... "sweet influences" of K[i]mah "Sirius the dog," by assuming that the Jews considered that the dog was mad, and hence was kept chained up. More important still, he fails to recognize that the Jews had a continental climate in a different latitude from the insular climate of Greece, and that both their agricultural and their weather conditions were different, and would be associated ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... he says that English humour "far from agreeable, and bitter in taste, like their own beverages, abounds in Dickens. French sprightliness, joy, and gaiety is a kind of good wine only grown in the lands of the sun. In its insular state it leaves an aftertaste of vinegar. The man who jests here is seldom kindly and never happy; he feels and censures the inequalities of life." On the contrary, we are inclined to think that French humour is fully as severe ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... are volcanic Natural resources: timber, crude oil, small unexploited deposits of gold, manganese, uranium Land use: arable land 8%; permanent crops 4%; meadows and pastures 4%; forest and woodland 51%; other 33% Environment: subject to violent windstorms Note: insular and continental regions rather ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pestilent by swamps to landward. Little work was then doing in palm oil, and the copper mines of the interior had ceased to send supplies. We borrowed hammocks to cross the swamps, and we found French Factory a contrast not very satisfactory to our insular pride. M. Charles de Gourlet, of the Maison Regis, was living, not in a native hut lacking all the necessaries of civilized man, but in a double-storied stone house, with barracoons, hospital, public room, orchestra, and so forth, intended ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... faithfully reflect in all countries the public taste? Produce me affirmative answers to these questions, which rest on solid proof, and I'll accept the present mania for athletic sports as something better than an outbreak of our insular boastfulness and our insular barbarity in ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... of Greenland, (which, by the by, may with propriety be called Parrynese,) I think there is a well authenticated account of a large sea-serpent seen upon the coast of that vast insular ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... her insular position, England will lose but very little through this war, provided she is able to maintain the supremacy of her navy over the German fleet. The British merchant marine and her ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Gozzo) forms, together with Malta and some islets, an insular group lying between the eastern part of Sicily and the Lesser Syrtis. It is situated in Lat. 36 2', Long. 12 10' nearly, and is distant from Sicily only about fifty miles. The colonisation of the island by the Phoenicians, asserted by Diodorus,[5123] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Anglo-Saxons appear to have developed a style of their own. Sir Gilbert Scott in his posthumous Essays characterises this early church architecture by two features—the square termination of the east end, and the west end position of the tower. This was quite insular, and not to be found in Roman patterns. In Professor Willis's plan of the first cathedral at Canterbury the east and west ends are both apsidal, and the two towers are placed on the north and ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... the rest. They admire the Christian institutions and look for a realisation of the apostolic life in vogue among themselves and in us. There are treaties between them and the Chinese, and many other nations, both insular and continental, such as Siam and Calicut, which they are only just able to explore. Furthermore, they have artificial fires, battles on sea and land, and many strategic secrets. Therefore ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... statement of the characteristic Maundevillian touches with regard to the mouth and tongue, and it may refer to some of the insular races which exist or existed in the district ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... kept as they find it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people; and the common people will use them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and I believe that this is not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from both ladies described the delights of the journey, which was taken in a leisurely sight-seeing manner; and as to Rocca Marina, it seemed to be an absolute paradise. Mr. White had taken care to send out an English upholsterer, so that insular ideas of comfort might be fulfilled within. Without, the combination of mountain and sea, the vine-clad terraces, the chestnut slopes, the magical colours of the barer rocks, the coast-line trending far away, the ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a good English dinner awaited us at the konak of the queen's messenger. It seemed so odd, and yet was so very comfortable, to have roast beef, plum pudding, sherry, brown stout, Stilton cheese, and other insular groceries at the foot of the Balkan. There was, moreover, a small library, with which the temporary occupants of the konak killed the month's interval between arrival ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... yet so it was in Skye." The acquisition of this branch of learning was not, indeed, expensive. Latin was taught for two shillings and sixpence the quarter, and English and writing for one shilling. Indeed it is scarcely more now. The people seldom quitted their insular homes, except when on service; and, to the silence of their wild secluded scenes, the romance of poetry and the composition of song gave a relief and ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... powerful maritime state, to their dominions, began to think of measures for obtaining a permanent possession of the Hebrides by expelling the Norwegians. The preparatory steps they took were first to secure the Somerled family, and next to gain over the insular chieftains. Haco was no less earnest to attach every person of consequence to his party. He gave his daughter in marriage to Harold King of Man; and, on different occasions, entertained at his ...
— The Norwegian account of Haco's expedition against Scotland, A.D. MCCLXIII. • Sturla oretharson
... in a nearly north and south direction, Piombino lying off about north-northeast from its northern extremity. Near this northern extremity lies the little rocky islet so often mentioned, or the spot which Napoleon, fifteen years later, selected as the advanced redoubt of his insular empire. Of course the Proserpine was on one side of this islet and the strange lugger on the other. The first had got so far through the Canal as to be able to haul close upon the wind, on the larboard tack, and yet to clear the islet; while ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... climate of England,—its insular form, geographical position, and its exposure to the warm currents of the Gulf Stream give it a temperature generally free from great extremes of heat or cold. On this account, it is favorable to the full and healthy development of both animal and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... would have no right to complain of any consequences that should follow from its inability to comprehend the condition of its neighbor. This country will not submit to the degradation which England would inflict upon it, and which no other European nation appears inclined to aid the insular empire in inflicting. Even Spain, proverbially foolish in her foreign policy, and seemingly unable to get within a hundred years of the present time, observes a decorum in the premises to which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... geographical boundaries which divided most of the civic territories, continually reasserted itself. The same instinct was ruling the history of European Greece as well. But while the disaster, which in the end it would entail, was long avoided there through the insular situation of the main Greek area as a whole and the absence of any strong alien power on its continental frontier, disaster impended over Asiatic Greece from the moment that an imperial state should become domiciled ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... value the giving of the alarm would have been; nevertheless, night and day eyes were strained through binoculars and telescopes for signs of the unique green on the horizon or the first seed slipping through to find a home on insular soil. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... use asking him for introductions; if he gave them, they would lead you into strange haunts. But if Fate compelled you to go to Llasa or Yarkand or Seistan he could map out your road for you and pass the word to potent friends. We call ourselves insular, but the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we're all a thousand per cent better than anybody else. Sandy was the wandering Scot carried ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... to take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday—Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn—Paris besprinkles ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the Enlightenment ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... to have this system obtain at home, but it is even more important to have it applied rigidly in our insular possessions. Not an office should be filled in the Philippines or Puerto Rico with any regard to the man's partisan affiliations or services, with any regard to the political, social, or personal influence which he may have at his command; ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Department of State, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Maritime Administration, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, National Maritime Intelligence Center, National Science Foundation (Antarctic Sciences Section), Office of Insular Affairs, US Board on Geographic Names, US Coast Guard, and other public and ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations ([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277] England had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... features he might be pronounced English, though even there one caught a dash of something Gallic; but he had no English shyness: he had learnt somewhere, somehow, the art of setting himself quite at his ease, and of allowing no insular timidity to intervene as a barrier between him and his convenience or pleasure. Refinement he did not affect, yet vulgar he could not be called; he was not odd—no quiz—yet he resembled no one else I had ever seen before; his general bearing intimated complete, sovereign satisfaction ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... visits to such museums as Horniman's at Forest Hill. The early social history may well take the form best suited to the child, and not appeal merely to surface interest. And the spirit in which the lives of other people are presented to children must not be the narrow, prejudiced, insular one, so long associated with the people of Great Britain, which calls other customs, dress, modes of: living, "funny" or "absurd" or "extraordinary," but rather the scientific spirit that interprets life according to its conditions ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... the most artificial society in the world is unquestionably the English nation. Our insular situation and our foreign empire, our immense accumulated wealth and our industrious character, our peculiar religious state, which secures alike orthodoxy and toleration, our church and our sects, our agriculture and our manufactures, our military ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... his insular prejudices, Norgate, on finding that the other seat in his coupe was engaged, started out to find the train attendant with a view to changing his place. His errand, however, was in vain. The train, it seemed, was crowded. He returned to his compartment to find already installed ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not the quest of the higher level and the extended horizon, international history would be imposed by the exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is younger than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. For him the foundations have been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is accounted for as distinctly ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... a correspondent from Venice, "has always been regarded by the Italian Press as the most insular of English newspapers." Still we think that La Difesa, of which he encloses an extract, goes too far in referring to our esteemed contemporary as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... is these peculiar customs that give an individuality to a nation, and John Bull abroad loses none of his insular obstinacy; but keeps his Christmas in the old fashion, and wears his clothes in the new fashion, without regard to heat or cold. A nation that never surrenders to the fire of an enemy cannot be expected ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... even care about the politics of France, or Germany, or Austria, or Russia? Not the slightest, you may be sure. Mark and his master represented the complete indifference of the Englishman or American—not necessarily a well-bred indifference, but an indifference that was insular on the one hand and republican on the other. If either of them had heard of a gentleman who pillaged an unmarried lady's luggage in order to secure a valuable paper for another lady, who was married, they would ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... used of late to designate an inhabitant of the Mother Isle in contra-distinction to other subjects of Her Majesty, expresses neatly the feeling of our insular cousins not only as regards ourselves, but also the position affected toward their ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... the insular portion of the prov. of Nova Scotia at its eastern extremity, 100 m. long and 85 broad; is covered with forests of pine, oak, &c., and exports ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... considered a recommendation. The English translation of Madame Dacier's prose Homer, issued by Ozell, Oldisworth, and Broome, was greeted with scorn. Trapp, in the preface to his Virgil, refers to the new French fashion with true insular contempt. Segrais' translation is "almost as good as the French language will allow, which is just as fit for an epic poem as an ambling nag is for a war horse.... Their language is excellent for ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... myself, have I repented of those cruel, scornful words I addressed to Dolores at our last interview; and now once more "I come to pluck the berries harsh and crude" of repentance and of expiation, to humble my insular pride in the dust and unsay all the unjust things I ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... her to selfishness, and her timidity to reserve and aloofness. She bid fair to grow up an insular, somewhat unlovable woman; but child though she was, conversion meant a radical change in character and purpose. She realized at once that as a follower of Jesus she might not live to please herself. She became interested in other people, their well-being and sorrows and ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... come to do anything by talking of it. The Reverend Mr. Hector Maclean. Bayle. Leibnitz and Clarke. Survey of Col. Insular life. Arrive at Breacacha. Dr. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... ladies made acknowledgment by a donation to the altar, befitting rather their rank than their appearance. But this excited no suspicion, as they were supposed to be Englishwomen, and the attribute of superior wealth attached at that time to the insular character as strongly as in ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... included in the Danish archipelago. The peninsula is divided between Denmark and Germany (Schleswig-Holstein). The Danish portion is the northern and the greater, and is called Jutland (Dan. Jylland). Its northern part is actually insular, divided from the mainland by the Limfjord or Liimfjord, which communicates with the North Sea to the west and the Cattegat to the east, but this strait, though broad and possessing lacustrine characteristics to the west, has only very narrow entrances. The connexion with the North Sea dates ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... grown to be for you. That panic, which will last for many months, adds to my fervent desire of your returning early in the autumn, that you may have neither fresh water nor the "silky" ocean to cross in winter. Precious as our insular situation is, I am ready to wish with the Frenchman, that you could somehow or other get to it by land,— Oui, c'est une isle toujours, je le sais bien; mais, par exemple, en allant d'alentour, n'y auroit-il pas moyen d'y arriver ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and much more has been accomplished by the insular government without calling upon the United States for any material help. It does not seem to be generally known that the Philippine Islands are now self-supporting, and that the only expense entailed on the general government is a slight increase for ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... his money abroad at all, he goes wild altogether. He rushes at obscure transactions, and lends to Peru, or Guatemala, or Tierra del Fuego, or some shaky place he knows nothing about. The insular maniac overlooks the continent of Europe, instead of studying it, and seeking what countries there are safe and others risky. Now, why overlook Prussia? It is a country much better governed than England, especially as regards great public enterprises ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... little Iberian. Caradoc and Regnus were tall middle-aged men of the fair flaxen British type. All three were dressed in the draped yellow toga after the Latin fashion, instead of in the bracae and tunic which distinguished their more insular fellow-countrymen. ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 740,000 whites, more than half have been born in the country, and many are the children, and a few even the grandchildren, of New Zealand-born parents. An insular race is therefore in process of forming. What are its characteristics? As the Scotch would say—what like is it? Does it give any signs of qualities, physical or mental, tending to distinguish it from Britons, Australians, or North Americans? The answer is not easy. Nothing is more tempting, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... always intoxicated Paul. He had not cared for it when he was younger. But in those days he was less cosmopolitan than now. Our insular John Bull sees nothing outside our own tight little island. But to Paul an awakening had come. Since those wonderful weeks he had known in Switzerland and Venice—now long years ago—he had looked out upon ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... door closed behind his conductor. His two rooms were en suite, and while as replete with comfort as the most thorough-going Englishman need desire, had yet about them a touch of lightness and elegance that smacked of a taste that had been educated on the Continent, and was unfettered by insular prejudices. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... which kept the Army Corps in England three months after it should have been sent to the Cape, is still to be met with. This attitude of mind—whether it be a consciousness of moral rectitude, or a mere insular disdain of looking at things from any but a British point of view—is still to be observed in the statements of those politicians who will even now deny that any trace of a definite plan of action, or of a concerted purpose, which could properly be described as a "conspiracy" ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... Christ,—should be regarded as a centre of light and influence for the large number of inhabited but benighted Islands scattered over the far and vast WEST of the Pacific Ocean. This missionary enterprise in the insular world beyond, besides its intrinsic importance, is among the necessary means, by its reacting influence, of raising the Hawaiian churches to the point of self-support and self-control; and its value, in this view, is already delightfully evident. The pecuniary means for supporting missionaries ...
— The Oahu College at the Sandwich Islands • Trustees of the Punahou School and Oahu College
... no appetite for anything. But she had a thirst—the sign of deep, of tormenting emotion. Yes it was emotion, not the brilliant sunshine—more brilliant than warm as is the way of our discreet self-repressed, distinguished, insular sun, which would not turn a real lady scarlet—not on any account. Mrs. Fyne looked even cool. She wore a white skirt and coat; a white hat with a large brim reposed on her smoothly arranged hair. The coat was cut something like an army mess-jacket ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... him and his estate. Their private opinion had been that Mr. Vanderpoel's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of paternal duty. The firm was highly reputable, long established strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of view. It did not understand, or seek to understand, America. It had excellent reasons for thoroughly understanding Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Its opinions of him it reserved to itself. If Messrs. Townlinson & ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... intensified into a terror that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... her level glance of reproach with one of frank apology. "If I see a man whose face I like, I speak to him. Surely Nature does not flash that subtle sense of magnetism for nothing. If I am to live fully, then must I infuse into my insular existence the electric spark of sympathetic friendship. Why impoverish my existence by a lost opportunity? If I had not alighted that day upon the lake and waited for you to come through the trees—" he fell suddenly quiet, knocking the ashes from his pipe upon the ground ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... armor. A message was flashed to the great naval radio station at Arlington, Va., which repeated it to the extent of its carrying radius of 3,000 miles, notifying all American ships at foreign stations and the governors and military posts of American insular possessions in the Pacific ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... as everything is simply bewildering: in about five years from now I shall know how I felt; but at present I feel nothing but discomfort; I hate foreign countries and foreign people, and am finding more every day how hopelessly insular I am: because of course, under the circumstances, this is the proper place for me to be: but it is a kind of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... after, he said; they went about everywhere—into factories and dock yards, and public buildings, and made funny little notes and sketches of things they didn't understand—so that they could explain them in Germany. In his fatuous, insular way, it pleased him to regard them rather as a species of aborigines benefiting by English civilization. The English Ass and the German Ass are touchingly alike. The shade of difference is that the English Ass's sublime self-satisfaction is in the German Ass self-glorification. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "Of what use will their navy be when my sword is once drawn, when I hold the coast towns of Calais and Boulogne, when my cannon command the Straits of Dover! The days of insular nations are passed, passed as surely as the days of England's arrogant supremacy ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had as yet sailed from Portugal. In 1443, however, Nuno Tristan discovered the island of Arguin, and as Gonzalo da Centra was in 1445 killed by a party of negroes, in attempting to ascend a small river, near the Rio Grande, the Portuguese considered an insular position to be the most eligible for a settlement, and the island of Arguin was accordingly ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... still more clearly marked in English history. That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach undaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotism which finds such moving expression in the paean ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... of British districts by colonists from two tribes, which, as his nearest neighbours, must certainly have formed part of any North Gallic confederacy under him—the Atrebates and the Parisii. The former had their continental seat in Picardy; the latter, as their name tells us, on the Seine. Their insular settlements were along the southern bank of the Thames and the northern bank of the Humber respectively. How far the two sets of Parisians held together politically does not appear; but the Atrebates, ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... of the earth?—to be able to hail the Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, as a brother—to have hopes even of the German and the Swede . . . if not in this life, still in the life to come? No . . . to be able still to sit apart from all Christendom in the exclusive pride of insular Pharisaism; to claim for the modern littleness of England the infallibility which I denied to the primaeval mother of Christendom, not to enlarge my communion to the Catholic, but excommunicate, to all practical purposes, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... book so obviously the work of a great abundant mind—a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of birds—a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious manners—a characteristically island brain, that was yet not insular. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Alexander Selkirk, typified by the genius of Defoe as his inimitable Crusoe, whose name (although one by no means uncommon in middle life in the east of England,) has become synonymous for all who build and plant in a wilderness, "cut off from humanity's reach?" Our insular situation has chiefly drawn the attention of the inhabitants of Great Britain to casualties by sea, and the deprivations of individuals wrecked on some desert coast; but it is by no means generally known that scarcely ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... our American air either of fonder discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward stirrings and the growth of a comparative sense of things have now begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general outward concussion of the English ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... uproar, but could be traced to no particular individual or group, grew momentarily louder—and died away. It was only when it had completely ceased that one realized how pronounced it had been—how altogether peculiar, secret; like that incomprehensible murmuring in a bazaar when, unknown to the insular visitor, a reputed saint ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... San Juan in Porto Rico should be dredged and improved. The expenses of the federal court of Porto Rico should be met from the Federal Treasury. The administration of the affairs of Porto Rico, together with those of the Philippines, Hawaii, and our other insular possessions, should all be directed under one executive department; by preference the Department of State or the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... clustered thickest along the coast, like the Danes in later days; and the great swampy expanse of the Fens, then a mere waste of marshland tenanted by beavers and wild fowl, formed the inland boundary or mark of their almost insular kingdom. ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... offered to the skeptic: Once, nearly twenty centuries ago, a young preacher travelled and taught through the villages and by the wayside in an obscure oriental country. He addressed a subject race, insular in their prejudices, lacking in political genius and in artistic culture. He lived in days calculated to chill the most fervid religious enthusiasm. He was at first ignored and then hated by His own people; the religious leaders became His implacable foes. His work ended in ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... demanded—at any rate for upwards of three centuries—that expeditions against foreign territory over-sea should be accompanied by a proper number of land-troops. On the other hand, the necessity of organising the army of a maritime insular state, and of training it with the object of rendering effective aid in operations of the kind in question, has rarely been perceived and acted upon by others. The result has been a long series of ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... representing large interests and great wealth, to become annexed to the United States and while there are, as I have already said, many and influential persons in the country who question the policy of any insular acquisition, perhaps even any extension of territorial limits, there are also those of influence and wise foresight who see a future that must extend the jurisdiction and the limits of this nation, and that will require ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... distinction between the decrees and the traditions of Rome, I drew a parallel distinction between Anglicanism quiescent, and Anglicanism in action. In its formal creed Anglicanism was not at a great distance from Rome: far otherwise, when viewed in its insular spirit, the traditions of its establishment, its historical characteristics, its controversial rancour, and its private judgment. I disavowed and condemned those excesses, and called them "Protestantism" or "Ultra-Protestantism:" I wished to find a parallel ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... seen in the summer morning light from the higher streets and houses of Edinburgh, and from the neighbouring shores of the Firth of Forth. These monastic buildings have been fortunately protected and preserved by their insular situation,—not from the silent and wasting touch of time, but from the more ruthless and destructive hand of man. The stone-roofed octagonal chapter-house is one of the most beautiful and perfect in Scotland; and the abbot's house, the cloisters, refectory, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... whimsical enough; but doubtless we are more operated on by the weather than by any thing else. Perhaps this is because we are islanders; for talk to an "intellectual" man about the climate, and out comes something about our "insular situation, aqueous vapours, condensation," &c. Then take up a newspaper on any day of a wet summer, and you see a long string of paragraphs, with erudite authorities, about "the weather," average annual depth of rain, &c.; and a score of lies about ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... of the US with policy relations between Guam and the US under the jurisdiction of the Office of Insular Affairs, US Department of ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... England down to the day of Hastings—call it the Saxon race, if you like the name, and for convenience' sake—was a slow, a sluggish, and a stupid race; and it never could have made a first-class nation of the insular kingdom. There is little in the history of the Saxons that allows us to believe they were capable of accomplishing anything that was great. The Danish invasions, as they are called, were of real use to England, as they prevented ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... England. Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwoman and the Italian there are the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian mondaine is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular, and absolutely British usage, a Native. None the less would she be surprised to find herself accused of a lack ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... on the English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "ille-isms" generally, seem to have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull. "A very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer" is his uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is Cunningham's Goldsmith of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by that Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... the islands in the Baltic, and the peninsula lying in the north-west of Germany, comprizing Jutland, Sleswig, and Holstein. The face of the country, both insular and continental, presents a striking contrast to that of Norway, being flat, and fertile in corn and cattle. Denmark possesses a large extent of sea coast, but the havens do not admit large vessels. The communication between the insular and continental ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... disappear from my sight. The house, in short, together with its furniture, was, I believe, intended to be a reproduction of an ancient Roman villa, and had something about it repellent to my rustic and insular ideas. In the contemplation of its perfection I experienced a curious mental sensation, which I can only compare to the physical oppression produced on some persons by the heavy and cloying perfume of a bouquet of gardenias or other too ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... Tetuila, the Philippines and Porto Rico are regarded as insular or territorial possessions of the United States, and are entitled ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... in Sicilian folk-lore around whom many jokes have gathered which are, in other parts of Italy, told of some nameless person or attributed to the continental counterparts of the insular heroes. These two are Firrazzanu and Giufa. The former is the practical joker; the second, the typical booby found in the ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... only permissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men. Needless to say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so near Queensland, are not Australians. They are Melanesians, but their customs are insular and unique. Curr (I., 279) says of them that they are "with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people who cultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and, un-Australian-like, treat their women ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... place glide into each other by the softest gradations, and the heat never, even in midsummer, reaches that extreme which is felt in higher latitudes of the American continent. The climate of Florida is in fact an insular climate; the Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, temper the airs that blow over it, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. I do not wonder, therefore, that it is so much the resort of invalids; it would ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... civilization and Christianity with ruin like its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhone and the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... pay rates towards the support of a Church of England school, finds himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a country ten times more insular in its pre-occupation with its own language, its own history, its own character, than we, who have always been explorers and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty millions strong. The total population of the French Republic is ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... prices now prevalent in England, and the paralyzing of great branches of trade which could not occur in an England that really ruled the sea, may be attributed in chief part to this war of the submarines. The advantage of the insular position of England has been greatly lessened, thanks to this excellent German weapon, even if it cannot be completely eliminated. But if one compares with the total voyages of the English merchant shipping the losses of the English merchant marine, amounting ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history, nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... in the physical history of the world when the patches of land already raised above the water became so united as to form large islands; and though the aspect of the earth retained its insular character, yet the size of the islands, their tendency to coalesce by the addition of constantly increasing deposits, and thus to spread into wider expanses of dry land, marked the advance toward the formation of continents. This extension of the dry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the Scionaeans and spoke to the same effect as at Acanthus and Torone, adding that they merited the utmost commendation, in that, in spite of Pallene within the isthmus being cut off by the Athenian occupation of Potidaea and of their own practically insular position, they had of their own free will gone forward to meet their liberty instead of timorously waiting until they had been by force compelled to their own manifest good. This was a sign that they would valiantly undergo any trial, however great; ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides |
