Word: britannia
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...trip. It was the first time in nearly a decade that far-off Fiji had glimpsed its Queen. Elizabeth, looking cool as ever in the 105° simmer, responded by quaffing a bowl of kava, the muddy national beverage made of mashed roots. Then, before boarding the royal yacht Britannia for the cruise on to New Zealand and Australia, she bowed to accept the traditional bouquet from one of her barefoot subjects, while others on a nearby British liner clicked away souvenir photos of their fellow South Seas tourist...
...week's cover by one of Britain's top cartoonists, Illingworth. "My cover won't be a happy one," said Leslie Illingworth, a jolly, 60-year-old Welshman with a John Bullish face, who draws for Punch and London's Daily Mail. He meant his Britannia to be looking a little aghast toward America, not Europe. "We're not anti-American in this country, and we understand the breakaway of the American Revolution, but when the kid comes and belts the old girl across the backside it's a bit much," he says...
...Power. But even then, Britons could not come to terms with the harsh reality of vanished might. Their feeling of shock today is all the greater because it has been so long delayed. As if by some malevolent design, a whole series of frustrations and failures has beset Britannia in a few short months, deepening the nation's angst. The abrupt U.S. cancellation of the Skybolt missile rudely exposed the fact that Britain's "independent" nuclear deterrent is in fact almost wholly dependent on Washington. There was a time when U.S. Presidents sought Britain's counsel...
...months ahead, Britannia could conceivably even retreat into isolation. Her history, talents and interests suggest, on the contrary, that she will find new worlds to win. "In the past," Arnold Toynbee wrote in Encounter, "the English have avoided the awful mistake of crying over spilt milk. They have quickly found and milked new cows. They stopped grieving over their defeat in the Hundred Years' War in the exhilaration of discovering and colonizing a New World. They stopped grieving over the loss of the 13 American colonies in the exhilaration of making the Industrial Revolution and acquiring a new Empire...
...19th century, when Britannia ruled the waves, its terra firma was unquestionably governed by the ruling classes. Though Britain today is a comparatively egalitarian society, most Englishmen are convinced that the country is still run by the Establishment, a tight little coterie of Top People who, by most definitions, include the leaders of the Tory party, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the editor of the Times, a scattering of Oxbridge dons, industrialists, financial mandarins, senior civil servants and a few fashionable hostesses...