Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of 'em from attacks by the other two

in 1967, when old and frail, Attlee was asked to address a group of anti-European Labour backbenchers, and obliged with a characteristically terse speech that captured the sentiments of many of his fellow citizens: 'The Common Market.The so-called Common Market of six nations. Know them all well. Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of 'em from attacks by the other two.'

D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), 220

The people of Woodford felt they belonged to a friendly, helpful community almost as unanimously as the people of Bethnal Green

Wilmott and Young expected to fund that the 'warmth and friendliness' that they had found in Bethnal Green had no equivalent in a middle-class commuter suburb, where the people were supposed to be frustrated, selfish  and lonely. But what they discovered was precisely the opposite. 'People in the suburb', they concluded, 'are on the whole friendly, neighbourly and helpful to each other. They attend churches and clubs together, they like (or at any rate profess to like) their follow-residents. ... [']The people of Woodford felt they belonged to a friendly, helpful community almost as unanimously as the people of Bethnal Green.'

D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), 125

It was the party of Empire, the King and the flag, and that was good enough for him

Powell was a man of almost obsessive passions, from Housman and Nietzsche to High Anglicanism and hunting. He was, in short, a nineteenth-century romantic, zealous and uncompromising, a man of causes. His decision to join the Conservative Party, for example, was based less on social and economic principles than on sheer romantic traditionalism. It was the party of Empire, the King and the flag, and that was good enough for him. 

D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), 85

By January 1958, the entire government comprised some eight-five ministers, of whom thirty-five were related to Macmillan by marriage

This was largely overshadowed, however, by the fact that the Cabinet itself had a very narrow social base. Of the sixteen members in January 1957, six had been at Eton, only two had not attended a major public school, and, as usual, there were no women at all. Even more remarkably, the government as a whole was crammed to the seams with Macmillan's own relatives. By January 1958, the entire government comprised some eight-five ministers, of whom thirty-five were related to Macmillan by marriage, including seven of the nineteen members of the cabinet.

D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), 78

Not while I'm alive he ain't

Unfortunately for Bevan, many of his own party colleagues detested him. Told that Bevan was his own worst enemy, the powerful trade unionist and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin commented: 'Not while I'm alive he ain't.' Herbert Morrison called him 'wicked', and Hugh Dalton wrote of his making 'a violent speech, of nauseating egoism and sweating with hatred'.

D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), 55-56

That does not sound much like Prussia

'Politics are the last thing we need. This at least I learned with the brethren at Neudietendorf. The state should be one family bound by love.'
'That does not sound much like Prussia,' said the Kreisamtmann.

P. Fitzgerald, The blue flower (1995), 76

From one village to the next you change language

That's in Russia! I had to look it up in an atlas. Not far from the Baltic Sea. There are several small countries in those parts: Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia ... With Poland and Russia surrounding them. The national borders don't match ethnic boundaries. From one village to the next you change language. And on top of that you've got Jews spread all over, constituting a separate race. And besides that, there are the communists!

G. Simenon, Pietr the Latvian (1930) tr. D. Bellos (2013), 129