During the Battle of Waterloo, a cannon shot struck the right leg of Henry Paget, Second Earl of Uxbridge, prompting this quintessentially British exchange:

Uxbridge: By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!

Wellington: By God, sir, so you have!

That may be apocryphal, but the leg went on to a colorful career of its own.

The single most British conversation in the history of human civilization, in my judgment, took place on the Upper Nile in 1899, when starving explorer Ewart Grogan stumbled out of the bush and surprised one Captain Dunn, medical officer of a British exploratory expedition:

Dunn: How do you do?

Grogan: Oh, very fit thanks; how are you? Had any sport?

Dunn: Oh pretty fair, but there is nothing much here. Have a drink? You must be hungry; I’ll hurry on lunch.

“It was not until the two men had almost finished the meal that Dunn thought it excusable to enquire about the identity and provenance of his guest.”

The problem of indoctrination is this: in a modern democratic society, the desired goal of education is that each student develop a set of beliefs that are rationally grounded and open to change when challenged by better-grounded beliefs. In order to develop such students, however, it would seem that they must acquire a belief in rational methods of knowing which must itself be beyond challenge, i.e., held in a manner inconsistent with its own content. Thus, students must be indoctrinated in order not to be indoctrinated: a pedagogical dilemma or paradox.

— Charles James Barr Macmillan, “‘On Certainty’ and Indoctrination,” Synthese 56:3 (September 1983), 363-372