At Knaptoft
There is, for example, the green deserted country around Knaptoft in the south of Leicestershire, where the pastures of central England hardly touch five hundred feet above the sea and yet they are the watershed between Trent and Severn; and streams gather here that end in the Humber, the Wash and the Bristol Channel.

This, more than anywhere, is the very heart of England: Knaptoft, with its ruined church, its font under the trees, its village under the sheep-pastures since Henry VII's time, its medieval manor house marked only by a rectangular island within a drying moat, and the later Elizabethan hall itself falling into slow ruin at the top of the field.

Once full of life, a thriving village of plough-land and meadow in the thirteenth century, the squire within his moat and the parson in the newly built church, now it dreams its life away in the autumn sunshine, deserted by all save occasional blackberry-pickers.

W. G. Hoskins Midland England (1949)

Democracy and prosperity
Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship.

Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies.

It is not - as, again, had been believed by most people before - because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

Bryan Magee Confessions of a Philosopher (1997)

A never-ending story
The choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions is not a once-and-for-all cataclysmic struggle, it is a series of running engagements, most of them never concluded, which occur, and have occurred, throughout history. Every human society, except the most totalitarian of utopias or anti-utopias, is a plural society with large areas which are not in conformity with the officially imposed or declared values.

Colin Ward Anarchy in Action (1973)

The balance of power
"It is one very extraordinary thing, your British Constitution," said the ex-King of Ruritania. "All the time when I was young they taught me nothing but British Constitution. My tutor had been a master at your Eton school. And now when I come to England always there is a different Prime Minister and no one knows which is which."

"Oh, sir," said the Major, "that's because of the Liberal Party."

Evelyn Waugh Vile Bodies (1930)