-
英国女王
Queen Elizabeth
II
?
Real name: Elizabeth
Alexandra Mary Windsor
?
Birth: 21 April 1926 in
London
?
Children: 3
sons, 1
daughter
The Role of the
Monarch
Before the English Bourgeois
Revolution:
(1) He personally exercised
supreme executive, legislative
and
judicial power.
(2) He manipulated the
election of the Archbishop.
(3) He
could grant lands and wealth to his favorites.
(4) He could appoint his followers to
important positions.
(5) He conferred
noble titles.
(6) He could have anyone
arrested, put into prison or to
death.
What powers does the Queen have?
Superficially, she is:
1)
official head of state
2) head of the
legal system of Britain
3) head of the
judiciary
3) commander-in-chief of the
armed forces
4) head of the Church of
England
She appoints the Prime
Minister, ministers, and important officials and
officers.
----- She presides the great
state functions
----- She gives many
important honors and awards.
----- She
concludes treaties and declares war.
----- She remits all or part of
the sentence passed on a criminal by
granting a ‘royal
pardon
赦免
令
’.
A less well
known role of the Queen, which is nevertheless
very important to British politics, is
that of a confidante to the Prime
Minister. Her long experience and her politically
neutrality make
her a good source of
informed observation on the day to day problems of
governance
The
culture of the United Kingdom is rich and varied,
and has been influential
on culture on
a worldwide scale.
It is a European state, and has many
cultural links with its former colonies,
particularly those that use the English
language (the Anglosphere).
Considerable contributions to British
culture have been made over the last
half-century by immigrants from the
Indian Subcontinent and the West Indies.
The origins of the UK as a political
union of formerly independent states has
resulted in the preservation of
distinctive cultures in each of the home nations.
Language
Main article: Languages in
the United Kingdom
The
United Kingdom has no official language. English
is the main language
and the de facto
official language, spoken monolingually by an
estimated 95%
of the UK population.
However, some
nations and regions of the UK have frameworks for
the
promotion of their autochthonous
languages. In Wales, English and Welsh are
both widely used by officialdom, and
Irish and Ulster Scots enjoy limited use
alongside English in Northern Ireland,
mainly in publicly commissioned
translations. Additionally, the Western
Isles council area of Scotland has a
policy to promote Scottish Gaelic.
Under the
European Charter for Regional or Minority
Languages, which is not
legally
enforceable, the UK Government has committed
itself to the promotion
of certain
linguistic traditions. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and
Cornish are to be
developed in Wales,
Scotland and Cornwall respectively. Other native
languages afforded such protection
include Irish in Northern Ireland, Scots in
Scotland and Northern Ireland, where it
is known in official parlance as
Scots
Sign Language.
The Arts
Literature
Sherlock
Holmes, played here by Jeremy Brett, was created
by British author
Arthur Conan
article: British literature
The earliest native literature of the
territory of the modern United Kingdom was
written in the Celtic languages of the
isles. The Welsh literary tradition
stretches from the 6th century. Irish
poetry also represents a more or less
unbroken tradition from the 6th century
to the present day, with the Ulster
Cycle being of particular relevance to
Northern Ireland.
Anglo-Saxon literature includes
Beowulf, a national epic, but literature in Latin
predominated among educated elites.
After the Norman Conquest
Anglo-Norman
literature brought continental influences to the
isles.
English
literature emerged as a recognisable entity in the
late 14th century,
with the rise and
spread of the London dialect of Middle English.
Geoffrey
Chaucer is the first great
identifiable individual in English literature: his
Canterbury Tales remains a popular
14th-century work which readers still
enjoy today.
Following the introduction of the
printing press into England by William Caxton
in 1476, the Elizabethan era saw a
great flourishing of literature, especially in
the fields of poetry and drama. From
this period, poet and playwright William
Shakespeare stands out as arguably the
most famous writer in the world.
The English novel became a
popular form in the 18th century, with Daniel
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel
Richardson's Pamela (1740) and
Henry
Fielding's Tom Jones (1745).
After a period of decline,
the poetry of Robert Burns revived interest in
vernacular literature, the rhyming
weavers of Ulster being especially influenced
by literature in Scots from Scotland.
The following
two centuries continued a huge outpouring of
literary production.
In the early 19th
century, the Romantic period showed a flowering of
poetry
comparable with the Renaissance
two hundred years earlier, with such poets
as William Blake, William Wordsworth,
John Keats, and Lord Byron. The
Victorian period was the golden age of
the realistic English novel, represented
by Jane Austen, the Bront?
sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Charles
Dickens, William Thackeray, George
Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
World War One gave rise to British war
poets and writers such as Wilfred
Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke
who wrote (often
paradoxically), of
their expectations of war, and/or their
experiences in the
trench.
The Celtic Revival
stimulated new appreciation of traditional Irish
literature,
however, with the
independence of the Irish Free State, Irish
literature came to
be seen as more
clearly separate from the strains of British
literature. The
Scottish Renaissance of
the early 20th century brought modernism to
Scottish
literature as well as an
interest in new forms in the literatures of
Scottish Gaelic
and Scots.
The English novel developed
in the 20th century into much greater variety and
was greatly enriched by immigrant
writers. It remains today the dominant
English literary form.
Other well-known novelists
include Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence,
George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, Mary
Shelley, Zadie Smith, J. R. R. Tolkien,
Virginia Woolf and J.K. Rowling.
Important poets
include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T. S. Eliot,
Ted Hughes,
John Milton, Alfred
Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexander Pope, and
Dylan
Thomas.
Religion
Main
article: Religion in the United Kingdom
Although today
one of the most 'secularised' states in the world,
the United
Kingdom is traditionally a
Christian country, with two of the Home nations
having official faiths:
Anglicanism, in the form of
the Church of England, is the Established Church
in
England. The Queen is Supreme
Governor of the Church of England.
Presbyterianism (Church of Scotland) is
the official faith in Scotland.
The Anglican Church in Wales was
disestablished in 1920.
The
Anglican Church of Ireland was disestablished in
1871.
Other religions
followed in the UK include Islam, Hinduism,
Sikhism, Judaism,
and Buddhism. While
2001 census information [2] suggests that over 75
percent of UK citizens consider
themselves to belong to a religion, Gallup
International reports that only 10
percent of UK citizens regularly attend
religious services, compared to 15
percent of French citizens and 57 percent
of American citizens. A 2004 YouGov
poll found that 44 percent of UK citizens
believe in God, while 35 percent do not
[3]. The disparity between the census
data and the YouGov data has been put
down to a phenomenon described as
with the religion they were
bought up as, or the religion of their parents.
[edit]
Food
Main article: British cuisine
Although there
is ample evidence of a rich and varied approach to
cuisine
during earlier historical
periods (particularly so amongst wealthy
citizens),
during much of the 19th and
20th century Britain had a reputation for
somewhat conservative cuisine. The
stereotype of the native cuisine was of a
diet progressing little beyond stodgy
meals consisting of