‘The greatest pleasure I know’, wrote Charles Lamb, ‘is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.’
"We have had four years of a president who scarcely troubles to hide his disdain for Britain."
The British case for Mitt Romney – Telegraph Blogs
By Daniel Hannan Last updated: September 1st, 2012
In 1660, some of the men who had ordered the execution of Charles I were themselves put to death, their corpses mutilated and strung up in public. A Royalist mob gathered at Tyburn, yelling angrily at the cadavers: ‘Enthusiasts! Enthusiasts!’
The British have never been especially keen on enthusiasm, either in its modern sense, or in the older meaning of ‘seized by religious fervour’. Americans – ideological descendants, in many ways, of those regicides – differ from us perhaps more in this than in any other regard.
When I took my seat in the Tampa convention hall with a group of MEPs, our Republican friends said: ‘You might be on camera, so try to behave like Americans: no eye-rolling’.
What followed could not have happened in any other country. One after another, friends and colleagues of Mitt Romney lined up to tell us about the many acts of kindness which he had performed unremarked.
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