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This could only happen in modern Britain. The Foreign Office has decided to get rid of its stuffy image by using a female cartoon character that looks suspiciously like Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The initiative rewards diplomats, which it treats as though they are kids, with stickers...

Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), surely one of the greatest of all Englishmen, is famous for creating the world's first English dictionary. This is the dictionary in which he warned us that 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for...

The liquid jade. A brew. A cuppa. Char. Or just plain old tea. The British have several names for their favourite drink, and they drink 150 million cupfuls of it every DAY, or almost 55 billion a year. But we probably wouldn't be enjoying as much tea today if it wasn't for a British botanist...

The Daily Mail's Andrew Roberts says that Britain giving US senator Ted Kennedy an honorary knighthood (only Commonwealth citizens can be given actual knighthoods) is nothing short of obscene. This was a man (of Irish ancestry, as his Irish great-grandfather emigrated to the US in 1849) who...

The peace process in Northern Ireland is under threat, and the spectre of civil war returning to the UK is raising its ugly head, after two British soldiers were shot dead in a drive-by shooting by suspected IRA dissidents last night. Four others, including two civilian pizza delivery men...

Anti-Englishness in football usually comes from Michel Platini, the Head of UEFA (European football's governing body), and his colleagues. This is usually down to Platini and UEFA's inferiority complex and jealousy towards English football whose teams have reached the European Cup Final every...

Cannons discovered from a Royal Navy warship that sunk off the Channel Island of Alderney in 1592 have been dubbed "Britain's first WMD." What has interested historians is that all the cannons that were retrieved from the wreck are identical, whereas just four years previously, when the Royal...

The far-right British National Party (BNP) has been embarrassed after it used a picture of an iconic British fighter plane on a leaflet for it anti-immigration campaign. Its manifesto for the upcoming elections to the European Parliament includes a ban on Eastern European migrants, such as...

Queen Victoria came to the British Throne in 1837 and reigned until 1901, Britain's longest-reigning monarch. The nation of which she was Head of State was the world's richest, with a manufacturing industry larger than the rest of the world put together, and it was also the most powerful country...

An ancient book containing strange medical remedies that was recently re-discovered is to go under the hammer at Bonhams Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, tomorrow. The 17th Century book contains ingredients such as ragwort, nightshade, venis turpentine, ferne roots...

Yesterday, terrorists attacked the Sri Lanka cricket team's bus as they were on their way to start the third day of their Second Test match against Pakistan in Lahore. Seven of the Sri Lanka players, household names in all cricket-playing nations, were injured and so was their British...

Former England cricket star Chris Broad was the hero yesterday after terrorists, probably Islamic, attacked the Sri Lanka team's bus as it was on its way to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore to play the third day of the Second Test against Pakistan. Broad, who is now a referee and way on his was...

Princess Beatrice has become the first British Royal to appear in a movie after having a cameo appearance in a new British movie released on 6th March. And the movie is about Princess Beatrice's great-great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Princess Beatrice, aged 20, the daughter of...

The British have traditionally not been very good at making great films. We leave that to Hollywood, whilst instead we make and export great music. It seems that great British movies come along every 25 to 30 years or so. 1981 gave us Chariots of Fire. 2008 gave us Slumdog Millionaire, which...

The old gentlemen at Lord's (England's national cricket stadium) in London may not be too happy to hear this. But, according to an academic, the ancient sport of cricket wasn't invented in England but was, in fact, invented in Continental Europe. He points to a 16th century work, attributed...

Britain has the worst air pollution from traffic in Europe, according to a government report. The fumes on certain stretches of British roads breach safety levels in a whopping 95% of cities and regions in the UK, compared with 82% in Austria, 52% in Germany and just 21% in France. This...

This is only the third year that Croke Park in Dublin has hosted rugby union's Six Nation's Championship. It is usually a stadium for gaelic football, the Republic of Ireland's national sport. However, with Landsdowne Road having been demolished to make way for the new Aviva Stadium, the...

A man has spent 30 years building a scale model of Herod's Temple in his garden - and it's still not completed. Mr Garrard has constructed the huge model in his garden in Norfolk using thousands of clay bricks and tiles, each one he baked and painted himself. His model has so impressed...

A famous photograph taken in 1940 shows plumes of black smoke surrounding London's St Paul's Cathedral (which miraculously, and thankfully, survived as all around it was being razed) as German bombers nightly discharged hundreds of bombs and incendiary devices causing devastation across the...

Only the British are probably eccentric enough to play a game of football which has HUNDREDS of players taking part and the nets are three MILES apart. But that is what happened yesterday when the annual Shrove Tueday football matches took place the length and breadth of the nation. The...