"Insular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Germany and southern Italy, St. Honorat was to the church of southern Gaul. For nearly two centuries the civilisation of the great district between the Loire and the Mediterranean rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the barbaric hordes who poured down the valleys of the Rhne and of the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona, till the Synod of Whitby, exercised over Northumbria. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... mean to imply that Sir Richard Calmady would have the insolence, is so much the victim of insular prejudice as, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Britain stands at the head of all European nations. Its abundant mineral wealth, especially in coal and iron, has stimulated manufactures to the highest degree, while its insular character and numerous seaports have had a similar stimulating effect upon commerce. Its revenue, aside from that of the colonies, amounts to about $920,000,000 annually, and its public debt ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... 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
... behold Saith she was erstwhile fleetest-fleet of crafts, Nor could by swiftness of aught plank that swims, Be she outstripped, whether paddle plied, Or fared she scudding under canvas-sail. 5 Eke she defieth threat'ning Adrian shore, Dare not denay her, insular Cyclades, And noble Rhodos and ferocious Thrace, Propontis too and blustering Pontic bight. Where she (my Pinnace now) in times before, 10 Was leafy woodling on Cytorean Chine For ever loquent lisping with her leaves. Pontic Amastris! Box-tree-clad Cytorus! Cognisant were ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Athenians to gain over their own offspring, the Ionian colonies, and by their means to deliver from the Persian yoke, and permanently attach to the Athenian interest, all the Asiatic Greeks. Extending his views, he beheld the various insular states united to Athens by a vast maritime power, severing themselves from Lacedaemon, and following the lead of the Attican republic. He saw his native city thus supplanting, by a naval force, the long-won pre-eminence and iron supremacy ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the tap-roots of his emotions striking deep into politics and philosophy, is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusually prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century owing to the state of our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted that English artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralise which has sometimes been a weakness, and sometimes has given them ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... 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 that Washington would avail himself ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... invasion has haunted far too exclusively the imagination of the English people, and has diverted their attention from another danger far more real and far more immediate. With characteristic naivete and insular selfishness, some jingoes imagine that if only the naval armaments of Germany could be stopped, all danger to England would be averted. But surely the greatest danger to England is not the invasion of England: it is the invasion of France and Belgium. For in the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... knowledge they were 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
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... 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; and if he should order affairs ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... 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 on low, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... 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 ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... other horses, and not press Buffalo. Now a fresh difficulty arose. The cavalry horses were entered by the subalterns of the regiment, who would ride the horses themselves, and the Englishman was going to send his servant to ride against them. There was the insular pride and bad taste of the English exemplified, and, in the end, John Hardy had to ride his own horse, very much ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... 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 amongst the now nearly 50,000 visitors attracted ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... oblivion to which he had consigned it. But in recompense for this, there was a very black cloud darkening the horizon of 1554. The Queen had announced to her Parliament her intended marriage with Prince Philip of Spain. All the old insular prejudices against foreigners rose up to strengthen the Protestant horror of a Spanish and Popish King. The very children in the streets were heard to cry, "Down with the Pope and the Spaniards!" Elizabeth would have known how to deal with such an emergency. But Mary was ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... island, or, in fact, two islands that are thus formed, as there is another passage into the sea about twenty-five miles north of North Bluff, are called by the natives "Kigyuektukjuar," in view of their insular character. Kigyuektuk means island, and especially a large island, King William Land being thus distinguished by them as the island. A "small island" is Kigyuektower, and ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Britain falls within the first description. An insular situation, and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army within the kingdom. A sufficient force to make head against a sudden descent, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... An insular and naval power acting on the continent would pursue a diametrically opposite course, but resulting from the same principle, viz.: to establish the base upon those points where it can be ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... of the profession. It may be harder to put a stop to the practice in the Supreme Court of the United States. That will have to be done, if at all, by the good sense of the Judges. The recent opinions of the Court in what are known as the Insular Cases have shocked the country and greatly diminished the weight and authority of the tribunal. This was not because of public disapproval of the opinion of the Court. It was because upon one of the greatest questions of Constitutional law and Constitutional liberty ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... brown moustache;—ay! and eh! and oh! and ah! coming frequently from his mouth; that he stood square while speaking, and seemed to like his own smile; an extraordinary touch of portraiture, or else a scoff at insular self-satisfaction; at any rate, it commended itself to the memory. Barto dismissed him, telling him to be daily in attendance on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... important 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 ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Carruthers,' sound so pleasantly in my ears; never so discordantly the 'Frulein Dollmann' that followed it. Every syllable of the four was a lie. Two honest English eyes were looking up into mine; an honest English hand—is this insular nonsense? Perhaps so, but I stick to it—a brown, firm hand—no, not so very small, my sentimental reader—was clasping mine. Of course I had strong reasons, apart from the racial instinct, for thinking her to be English, but I believe that if I had had none at all I should ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... forth no great intensity 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 itself at a night's notice. They had about ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... 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 about one ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... travel for miles. Then, thinking I had shaken it off, I would alight and proceed upon my walk. Five minutes later another detachment would be upon my heels. I would slink home, the Belgian Army pursuing me with its exultant tattoo. Vanquished, shamed, my insular pride for ever vanished, I would creep up into my room and close the door. The victorious Belgian Army would then march back ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... her insular position and the extent of her commerce, must maintain a large navy; a large army is also necessary for the defence of her own coasts and the protection of her colonial possessions. Her men-of-war secure a safe passage for her merchant-vessels, and transport ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... Floras" (page 9) there is what I must think an error, which I before pointed out to you: viz., you say that the plants which are wholly distinct from those of nearest continent are often very common instead of very rare. (379/1. "Insular Floras," pamphlet reprinted from the "Gardeners' Chronicle," page 9: "As a general rule the species of the mother continent are proportionally the most abundant, and cover the greatest surface of the islands. The peculiar species are rarer, the peculiar genera of continental ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... express it save that this is John Bull taken to literature—the exaggerated John Bull of the caricaturists—with every quality, good or evil, at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a kindly heart, the explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the want of sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness, the overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle, and every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 to give in to the ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... increased knowledge, a wider outlook. No discipline came with it, and one of its earliest products was a nervous dread of being thought behind the time, of being called ignorant, narrow-minded, insular. People would do anything to avoid this. They went to the length of interlarding their speech and writings with foreign words often in ignorance of the meaning of those words. Broad-minded, catholic, tolerant, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... boots it to remind The younger here of our ethereal band And hierarchy of Intelligences, That this thwart Parliament whose moods we watch— So insular, empiric, un-ideal— May figure forth in sharp and salient lines To retrospective eyes of afterdays, And print its legend large on History. For one cause—if I read the signs aright— To-night's appearance of its Minister In the assembly of his long-time sway Is near ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... to get your note and the Notts. Newspaper. I have seldom been more pleased in my life than at hearing how successfully your lecture (At the Nottingham meeting of the British Association, August 27, 1866. The subject of the lecture was 'Insular Floras.' See "Gardeners' Chronicle", 1866.) went off. Mrs. H. Wedgwood sent us an account, saying that you read capitally, and were listened to with profound attention and great applause. She says, when your final allegory (Sir Joseph Hooker allegorized the Oxford ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... feet, four and a half inches high; but his head was fine, heavy, symmetrical. His features twitched when he was disturbed, but were beautiful when he smiled. To a profound observer he looked dangerous. He had the faculty of making his face signify nothing at all. He had been begotten an insular Italian, but was born a Frenchman. His wife, a Creole, more than six years older than he, was in the box with him. She sat at the front, and was seen by thousands. She wished to be seen; and when the pit shouted ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... me!' answered Leonora, with a smile that captivated the Boshman. It is a rule among the tribes of Kokoatinaland, and in Africa generally, to greet a new acquaintance with a verbal play on his name.[3] Owing to our insular ignorance, and the difficulty of the task, this courtesy had been omitted at Oxford in Ustani's case, even by the Professors of Comparative Philology and the learned Keeper of the Museum. From that hour to another which struck later, when he ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... so terribly insular. You must really get rid of all that. I used to think like you, but here we have got to the place where we can laugh at all that ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... seventy-fours, moored in the deep-green water, close under the lee of that oblong, castellated mass of rock, Ilha Dos Cobras, which, with its port-holes and lofty flag-staffs, looks like another man-of-war, fast anchored in the way. But what is an insular fortress, indeed, but an embattled land-slide into the sea from the world Gibraltars and Quebecs? And what a main-land fortress but a few decks of a line-of-battle ship transplanted ashore? They are all one—all, as King David, men-of-war from ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... I have suggested, his chief duty was to continue President McKinley's policies, which concerned mostly the establishment of our insular dependencies, and the readjustment of our diplomatic relations. I have described how he closed the dispute over the Alaskan Boundary, over our joint control with England over the Isthmus of Panama, and how he circumvented ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... English. Probably the "English dancing-schools" in those days would think the solemn walk of the Pavan quite as lively an amusement as good society could allow. There are other passages too which show that Shakespeare (or his characters) had a fine 'insular' feeling against these 'newfangled' fashions ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... 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 ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... shortly rose behind it: hill after hill came up into view, at a distance looking like islands, which indeed many of them were; but, on a nearer approach, the parts connecting the others became visible, and the mainland of this vast insular continent gradually revealed itself to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... never heard such an old-fashioned insular sentiment from you. One would think it was your namesake. By the bye, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... encroachments of the crown. When our Revolution broke out, her Assembly passed resolutions declaring their entire concurrence in the principles set forth by the Congress, and gave as the reasons for not joining in our armed vindication of them, their insular position, and the peculiar nature of their population. Had geography permitted, Jamaica would doubtless have made one Slave State the more in the original Union, and would have been one of the fiercest afterward ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... me for a long time after I first went to California. I am not only accustomed to an offensive insular patriotism on the part of my countrymen, but, in addition, all my life I have had to apologize to them for being a New Englander. The statement that I was brought up in Boston always produces a sad ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... bloody and desperate revolutions. They boast here of representatives, ministers, a standing army, and governors: so it is no wonder that they have their revolutions. At some future day this must be one of the richest countries of La Plata. The soil is varied and productive; and its almost insular form gives it two grand lines of communication by ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... likewise; as they failed to conserve this safeguard of representation with taxation, the consequence was that everywhere excepting in England parliamentary institutions ceased to exist. England owed this singular felicity to her insular situation. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... strong body of British auxiliaries were sent to Flanders; the English officers learned the theory and practice of war in the best of all schools, and under the best of all teachers; that ignorance of the military art, the result in every age of our insular situation, and which generally causes the four or five first years of every war to terminate in disaster, was for the time removed, and that mighty genius was developed under the eye of Louis XIV., and by the example of Turenne, which was destined ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... when 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 as English—they ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... which was still, I suppose, the most popular health resort in Southern Europe. The peace of 1763 opened the way. And this brings us to another feature of distinction in regard to Smollett's Travels. Typical Briton, perfervid Protestant of Britain's most Protestant period, and insular enrage though he doubtless was, Smollett had knocked about the world a good deal and had also seen something of the continent of Europe. He was not prepared to see everything couleur de rose now. His was quite unlike the frame of mind of the ordinary holiday-seeker, who, partly from a voluntary ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the Philippines and Porto Rico are regarded as insular or territorial possessions of the United States, and are entitled to the ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... who had once been most zealous for monarchy, he had already made many rebels in heart. Yet he might still, with some chance of success, have appealed to the patriotic spirit of his subjects against an invader. For they were a race insular in temper as well as in geographical position. Their national antipathies were, indeed, in that age, unreasonably and unamiably strong. Never had the English been accustomed to the control of interference of any stranger. The appearance ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for three years he had been the bosom friend of Christ—had very narrow views as to the intended scope of the Gospel. He believed that the Gentiles were common and unclean; and it took, first a vision, and then a miraculous experience, to cure him of that insular idea. But he was cured, and never went back to his ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... spirit is a continental spirit; there is nothing insular or narrow about it. It is informal, nonchalant, tolerant, sanguine, adaptive, patient, candid, puts up with things, unfastidious, unmindful of particulars; disposed to take short cuts, friendly, hospitable, unostentatious, inclined to exaggerate, generous, unrefined,—never ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... opportunity of making extremely useful for Germany and Italy the irrelevant and vacillating idealism and the timid absolutism of the third Napoleon. Great Britain has occupied in this respect a better situation than has the Continental Powers. Her insular security made her more independent of the menaces and complications of foreign politics, and left her free to be measurably liberal at home and immeasurably imperial abroad. Yet she has made only a circumspect use ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... exclaimed, "I discern only wooden furniture; but I find serene countenances and hearts of gold." Paul, enchanted with the affability of the governor, said to him,—"I wish to be your friend: for you are a good man." Monsieur de la Bourdonnais received with pleasure this insular compliment, and, taking Paul by the hand, assured him he might rely ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... possessed. Let it be understood, however, that it was not the correct and original pronunciation that we cared for—that has perished probably beyond recall, even in the case of Greek, in spite of the Asiatic and the Insular Greeks—what we demanded in vain was any pronunciation whatever that should be articulate, apprehensible, and intercommunicable, such as might differentiate the words: whereas a system of mere vowels ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... combatants was not an easy or a popular task. National rivalry was apt to break out, and it was hard for the judges to escape the imputation of partiality. Nor did the English, it must be admitted, return from the field in much good humor. With a feeling of complacency engendered by their insular position and their long isolation from the Continent, they had been wont to consider themselves as far superior to the French in all exercises of strength and agility. The French knights had shown themselves fully equal to their English opponents; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... 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 ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... commercial, and possibly racial—are involved. Thus far the champions have been chiefly the newspapers for spelling as it is, and scholars and educators for spelling as it ought to be. But, in spite of the intelligence of the disputants, the discussion has been singularly insular and deficient in perspective. It would gain greatly in conclusiveness if spelling and its modifications were considered broadly and historically, not as peculiar to English, but as common to all languages, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... distressing results—though all comes right at last—and a lyrical description of an upset of his coach, the only one he ever had, written by a gifted hostler. But on call he could give "The Tight Little Island," "Rule Britannia" or any one of a dozen other insular melodies. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... period of early insular or purely native thought, from before the Christian era until the eighth century; by which time, Shint[o], or the indigenous system of worship—its ritual, poetry and legend having been committed to writing ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... CUMMING, M.A., F.G.S., Vice-Principal of King William College, Castletown, who is engaged in the Preparation of a Work on the Monumental Remains of the Isle of Man, is superintending the labours of an Italian Artist in taking Casts of the most beautiful and important Runic Crosses, to be placed in the Insular Museum at the College: Parties desiring Duplicates may obtain full particulars of cost, &c. by application ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... the arduous and responsible position which I now hold, I did not dream of instituting any steps for the acquisition of insular possessions. I believed, however, that our institutions were broad enough to extend over the entire continent as rapidly as other peoples might desire to bring themselves under our protection. I believed further that we should not permit any independent government ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... for in this way. The 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 and the Revolution. That reaction was not ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... thoroughly explored of late years, the records of the Bollandists would probably throw some light, discussing as they do, at great length, the lives of such English Saints as Edward the Confessor and Wilfrid of York; and yet they are not too favourably disposed towards our insular Saints, since they plainly express their opinion that our pious simplicity has filled their Acts with incredible legends and miracles, more suited to excite ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... mean to have the impertinence, my good man, to tell two American ladies that what they are looking for is not in good taste, simply because you are so stupid and insular as not to keep it in stock? Do you presume to express your opinion on taste when you are wearing a green satin necktie with a pink shirt? If you had ever been off this little island, and had gone to a land where taste in dress, ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... 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 to assimilation from without as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "That's their insular provincialism, then. I don't care a cent. The old man would have wrecked the Great Buchonian before breakfast for a pipe-opener. My God, I'll do it in dead earnest! I'll show 'em that they can't ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... communities, and in their turn received a salutary mitigation, till in process of time the conqueror and conquered, having a common interest, were lost in each other. To neither of these modes was unfortunate Ireland subject, and her insular territory, by physical obstacles, and still more by moral influences arising out of them, has aggravated the evil consequent upon independence lost as hers was. The writers of the time of Queen Elizabeth have pointed out how unwise it was to transplant among a barbarous people, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Their faces and skins, where exposed, were not tanned, but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun. They guessed and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye when they spoke to you. They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they could get their 365 Islands—so they call the large stones on which they live—under weigh, they would not be long in towing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... Norman Conquest England, because of its insular position, had remained out of touch with Continental Europe. William the Conqueror and his immediate successors were, however, not only rulers of England, but also dukes of Normandy and subjects of the French ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... was shouted 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 wind preventing us from entering the harbour, we ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... make for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength 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 ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... walk back had been extraordinarily fine. The intense insular clearness one sees only in Ireland, and after rain, was throwing out every ripple in the sea and sky, and every crevice in ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... look like copses in the middle of green meadows; they are called by the natives "ilhas de mato," or islands of jungle; the name being, no doubt, suggested by their compactness of outline, neatly demarcated in insular form from the smooth carpet of grass, around them. They are composed of a great variety of trees loaded with succulent parasites, and lashed together by woody climbers like the forest in other parts. A narrow belt of dense wood, similar in character to ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... stretching out a long finger to the north-west in the shape of Cape La Hague; and this most characteristic part of the land has impressed a kind of peninsular character on the whole region. But we must not forget that the land of Coutances is not wholly peninsular, but also partly insular. The Norman islands, those fragments of the duchy which remained faithful to their natural Duke when the mainland passed under the yoke of Paris, are essential parts of the Constantine land, diocese and county. Modern arrangements have transferred their ecclesiastical allegiance ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... select such savage examples of the idea of a Supreme Being as are attested by ancient native hymns, or are inculcated in the most sacred and secret savage institutions, the religious Mysteries (manifestly the last things to be touched by missionary influence), or are found among low insular races defended from European contact by the jealous ferocity and poisonous jungles of people and soil. We also note cases in which missionaries found such native names as 'Father,' 'Ancient of Heaven,' 'Maker of All,' ready-made to ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to enforce a hard morning's work on the book they were reading—a play of Schiller's, of the plot of which, it is needless to say, no one of his pupils had or cared to have the vaguest notion, having long since condemned the whole subject, with insular prejudice, as "rot." ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... chief, and princes, and the parallel is as nearly as possible complete. The result of the system, however, in the two countries was different, for apart from the support received by the Mikado from the belief in his heavenly origin, the insular position of Japan prevented the possibility of the advent of elements of disorder from without, whereas the principalities of China were surrounded by semi-barbarous states, the chiefs of which were engaged ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... service, which might still further be immeasurably exalted, and the most extravagant, derogatory, inefficient, and preposterous project that could be devised for the security and protection of an insular, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... that surface simplicity of theirs which 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
... their political ideas," continued the unsparing critic; "for the old insular belief that all foreigners were devils and rogues they substituted another belief, equally grounded on insular lack of knowledge, that most foreigners were amiable, good fellows, who only needed to be talked to and patted on the ...
— When William Came • Saki
... for that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but assured us each time we returned to the charge—about every quarter of an hour—that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to the ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... change of name was, I believe, introduced by the celebrated French geographer, Malte Brun, who, in his division of the globe, gave the appellation of Austral Asia and Polynesia to the new discovered lands in the southern ocean; in which division he meant to include the numerous insular groups scattered over ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... 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 preposterous ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is surely losing its reputation. If, then, the Manila cigars have not hitherto succeeded in making themselves acceptable in Europe on account of their inferiority, the blame is attributable simply to the system of compulsory labor, and the chronic insolvency of the Insular Treasury, whilst the produce of other tobacco countries has steadily progressed in quality in consequence of free competition. The fame of the Manila cigars may also have suffered in some slight ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... waiters, who, not having knowledge of our nationality, mistook us for English people, and wrecked our nerves by making our tea as strong and black as beer, with a view to large "tea-money" for this delicate attention to our insular tastes. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... life. Many of the well-to-do farmers, as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, never took a land journey of more than twenty miles from home. Because of such restricted environment, the people of Suffolk County were rather insular in early days, yet the average grade of intelligence was high, for some of England's most progressive blood had settled there in the first half of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Dorset," said Katie with a cold and insular emphasis, "lives here." And "You," she tried to convey with her eyes, "you, for all your smart black silk, are a hireling. I am Miss Batch. I happen to have a hobby for housework. I have ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... territory of the US; administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, US Department of ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of the lower and outer Sikkim Himalaya, though on a much more gigantic scale, is not comparable in beauty and luxuriance with the really tropical vegetation induced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of these perennially humid mountains. At the Himalaya forests of gigantic trees, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark gray foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... 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 ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... officers of the revenue, and were finally pursued by a military force, their murmurs assumed a more alarming tone, in the terrified ears of my attendant and myself, when, without daring to seem to understand them, we heard them curse the insular heretics, on whose account God, Saint James, and Our Lady of the Pillar, had blighted their hopes of profit. These are ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... you are! You Americans are the most insular of all the great peoples of the world. You know nothing of other people. You know only your own history and not even that correctly, your own geography, and your own political science. You know nothing of Canada. You don't ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... of the phenomena of love and marriage, for on them it is not 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 ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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 ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... his friendship, John Leech was 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 ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... "Your Colonel's an insular baa-lamb, Bobby; you can bet Wolseley never said it. Surely, as I was born and brought up in Canada I'm likely to know a red Indian from ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... suffered a good deal in the past from having attributed to us motives which were not ours. The reason was the assumption that the apparent absence of definiteness in national purpose must have been designed as a cover for hidden and selfish ends. It is not true. We are indeed very insular, and what has been called the international mind is not common among the people of these islands. But we are kindly at heart, and when we have seemed self-regarding it has been simply because we were not conscious ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... Ionian and insular both in style and sympathy; Delos and no other is Apollo's chosen seat: but the second part is as definitely continental; Delos is ignored and Delphi alone is the important centre of Apollo's worship. From this it is clear that the two parts need not be of one date—The first, indeed, is ascribed ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... farce that at its best was really excellent fun. And he may take it for flattery, if he likes, when I say that a good deal of his dialogue might be adapted into the French without offending our gallant Allies on the ground of a too insular squeamishness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... extent in revolt against the theories of the Gaelic League, which he thought tended to make Ireland insular morally as well as materially. He was a good European because he was a good Irishman; and because he was both, he was, though largely educated in Germany, a fierce partisan ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that one doesn't constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular faculty to "gush"? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already lost her husband ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... 49, British Museum.... The document is in a French record hand, and the writer was evidently little versed in the insular script. He uses both and th, ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... 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
... The idea has been more than once echoed here. The truth is that while Irving was intensely American in feeling he was first of all a man of letters, and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular. He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme. Of England, whose traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would like to write about it. In Spain he was saturated with the romantic story ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... in thought as well as in dress, and the best of us follow both, as sheep follow their leader. We will sometimes follow our neighbor's line of insular prejudice, when worlds could not bribe us to copy her grammar or her gowns. Dull people admire youth. They excuse its follies; they adore its prettiness. That it is only a period of education, and that real life begins with maturity, ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... Britisher he is forgiven for those luxuries of insular stupidity which punctuate his history. I know what a fine fellow he is, and I pass them by. Mr. Churchill speaks of the German fleet as a "luxury"; but this is only one of those cold-storage impromptus that a reputation for cleverness must keep on hand, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... picturesque features of the robbery of the diligence, the state of Vendee, and the details about the Companions of Jehu, thanking each informant by voice and gesture with the stiffness peculiar to our insular cousins, replacing his note-book enriched each time by a new item in a side pocket ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the Interior), Maritime Administration (Department of Transportation), National Center for Medical Intelligence (Department of Defense), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (Department of Defense), Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Department of Defense), Office of Insular Affairs (Department of the Interior), Office of Naval Intelligence (Department of Defense), US Board on Geographic Names (Department of the Interior), US Transportation Command (Department of Defense), Oil & Gas Journal, and other public ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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 any part of nature is simple than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... at the Sandwich Islands,—mixed in blood, but one in 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 Oahu College at the Sandwich Islands • Trustees of the Punahou School and Oahu College
... Kerry to establish a steam ferry. But ferrymen are always stern sticklers for vested rights. Doubtless Charon claimed heavy compensation when the Styx Ferry was disestablished. Apart from the ferryman, however, the Valentians are by no means enamoured of their insular position. "That ould blackgyard of a ferry" is, in fact, just now a serious ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... of the English to Christianity," says Freeman, "at once altered their whole position in the world. Hitherto our history had been almost wholly insular; our heathen forefathers had had but little to do, either in war or peace, with any nations beyond their own four seas. We hear little of any connection being kept up between the Angles and Saxons who settled in Britain, and their kinsfolk who abode in their original country. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... English newspapers have made me so angry, that I scarcely know whether I am as much ashamed, yet the shame is very great. As if the people of France had not a right to vote as they pleased![9] We understand nothing in England. As Cousin said, long ago, we are 'insular' of understanding. France may be mistaken in her speculations, as she often is; and if any mistake has been lately committed, it will be corrected by herself in a short time. Ignoble in her speculations ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... 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. ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... conditions into fresh varieties, which in process of time became distinct species. Two of the oldest were flowers of the dandelion and daisy group, provided with feathery seeds which enable them to fly far before the carrying breeze; and these two underwent such profound modifications in their insular home that the systematic botanists who at last examined them insisted upon putting each into a new genus, all by itself, invented for the special purpose of their reception. One almost equally ancient inhabitant, a sort of harebell, also became in process of time extremely unlike any other harebell ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... 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 Minister at ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... in the first place, the gang had its advocates who, though they could not extol its virtues, since it had none, were yet able, and that with no small measure of success, to demonstrate to a people as insular in their prejudices as in their habitat that, but for the invincible Navy which the gang maintained for their protection, the hereditary enemy, the detested French, would most surely come and compel them one and all to subsist upon a diet of ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... the very essence was that unquestioning acknowledgment of his rank. That the land of his adoption should have dubbed him Mr. Jussuks—in stolid unconsciousness, too, of the solecism—was an outrage of a totally different order—an outrage only to be condoned on the score that an impenetrable insular gaucherie, and not a malicious impertinence, was responsible ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... 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 ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... 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 movement would unquestionably have run the same course and achieved ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... prepare for the worst, and still, as far as he could, to try to pacify these rivals; but to reconcile an American and an Englishman, two men hostile to one another from their birth, one endowed with real insular prejudice, the other with the adventurous, irreverent spirit of his country, was no easy task. When the doctor thought of their eager rivalry, which in fact was one of nationalities, he could not help, ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... inhabitants in the different continents Relation of range in genera and species Distribution of the inhabitants in the same continent Insular Faunas Alpine Floras Cause of the similarity in the floras of some distant mountains Whether the same species has been created more than once On the number of species, and of the classes to which they belong ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... portion of land which becomes insular at high-water—as Old Woman's Isle at Bombay, and among others, the celebrated Lindisfarne, thus tidally ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... thoughts that had assailed us on the reception of the bad news, was the necessity of engaging an English medical man. But at the first sight of the French doctor, as, clad in a long overall of white cotton, he entered the sick-room, our insular prejudice vanished, ousted by complete confidence; a confidence that our future experience of his professional skill and ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... 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
... time when the enthusiast has not been treated as a very unsafe man. Rome has found a place for the dreamiest mystic or the noisiest ranter—found a place and found a sphere of useful labour. We, with our insular prejudices, have been sticklers for the narrowest uniformity, and yet we have accepted, as a useful addition to the Creed of Christendom, one article which we have only not formulated because, perhaps, it came to us from a Roman Bishop, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... this book—"Oranges and Lemons"—a little difficult. The 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 ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... Lancelot. Returning, she discovered him in the arms of the nymph Vivian, the mistress of Merlin, who on her approach sprung with the child into a deep lake and disappeared. This lake is held by some to be the lake Linius, a wide insular water near the sea-coast, in the regions of Linius or "The Lake;" now called Martin Mere or Mar-tain-moir, "a water like ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... to artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... is so afraid of water for herself, as I am 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 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... defence, and was the only country in which the issue had to be submitted to a referendum, twice rejected the extension of the principle of compulsion to service outside the borders of the Commonwealth. The Channel Islands, which also had compulsion for their own insular defence, were equally loath to expand the idea, and Ireland was for political and some logical reasons exempted from the scope of the British Act; the Home Rule Bill had been placed on the statute-book, ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... atmosphere 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 ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... island of Bornholm, which, as will be seen, is not to be 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... good deal less disguise, but, after all, we have to take things as they come, and I throw myself into the deep comfort of gratitude that her situation has overtaken her in this country, where every perfect ministration will surround her, rather than in your far-off insular abyss of mere—so to speak—picturesqueness. I should have been, in that case, at the present writing, in a fidget too fierce for endurance, whereas I now can prattle to you quite balmily; for which you are all, no doubt, deeply grateful. Give her, please, my tender love, and say to her that ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Heaven!'—The Poet 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. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... describe. Such things had never come under their admiring gaze before, and their shouts and exclamations were quite amusing. It would have been cruel, after all this, not to give them a specimen of the style in which we insular anglers coax trout to their destruction; so having ordered supper to be ready at eight, and sent a message to the postmaster that I would be glad if he could come and take part of it with us, we sallied forth, under ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... 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 ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the rope—so ignominious, so hateful—he shuddered. But the shame of it was for his wife, who had dissipated a certain selfish and envious strain in him. Jessica had drawn from him the Puritanism which had made him self- conscious, envious, insular. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... merit of examining the original evidence which they have produced. * Note: Compare Gallet, Memoires sur la Bretagne, and Daru, Histoire de Bretagne. These authors appear to me to establish the point of the independence of Bretagne at the time that the insular Britons took refuge in their country, and that the greater part landed as fugitives rather than as conquerors. I observe that M. Lappenberg (Geschichte von England, vol. i. p. 56) supposes the settlement of a military colony formed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... for naval increases. The lull in naval construction, however, was of short duration. The wisest statesmen realized, from the time when Japan first emerged from her Oriental seclusion and eagerly set out to learn the lessons of western civilization, that their country's insular situation made a strong navy the first requisite of national independence. It was the warships of the western world that forced the Japanese to open their door to the foreigner. Fifteen years after the Japanese had seen the foreign men-of-war riding dominant ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... his plans with enthusiasm. He is fair to all classes, but will not tolerate movements that make for the subversion of the constitution or the wanton disturbance of law and order. Intensely Canadian, he is not insular, for few men in his line have read more extensively in the fields of history. Having made these notes on the men who have guided the Force, we can take up the story again where we ended the last chapter with the close of the second ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... has never paid its way, has always been an open wound. But he never spoke there, and listened to the fierce speeches of the local members with his idle, easy smile. He seemed to stand aloof from his new neighbours and their insular interests. He was, it appeared, a cultured man, and perhaps found none in this wild island who could understand his thoughts. His attitude towards his surroundings was, in a word, the usual indifferent attitude ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... we may say that the objections to foreign travel rose from a variety of motives. Ascham doubtless knew genuine cases of young men spoiled by too much liberty, and there were surely many obnoxious boys who bragged of their "foreign vices." Insular prejudice, jealousy and conservatism, hating foreign influence, drew attention to these bad examples. Lastly, there was another element in the protest against foreign travel, which grew more and more strong towards ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... concludes, "the Emperor Alexander was seen waltzing round the room at Almack's with his tight uniform and numerous decorations," or [Gronow, 'Recollections', 1860, pp. 32, 33] "Lord Palmerston might have been seen describing an infinite number of circles with Madame de Lieven," insular prejudices gave way, and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron |
