Places & Nations Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

The bigger the German, the smaller the bathing suit.

That fool has more front than Blackpool.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Northern-ness is a state of mind, not a set of co-ordinates.

The London tube-map looks like an autopsy of a single cow's stomach.

Ronnie's going straight — as the Circle line.

Every country gets the circus it deserves: Spain gets bullfights, Italy gets the Catholic Church, America gets Hollywood.

Canada isn't so much a country as a 4,0000 mile clothesline. St John's in Newfoundland is closer to Milan, Italy, than it is to Vancouver.

In that part of America the roads are as smooth as a computer screen.

Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion: you leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind.

If it is a choice between London and Newcastle, I'd take Newcastle — even though the women look like Dennis Healey in a donkey jacket and sound like screeching parrots.

It's so cold in New York today that Donald Trump's hair went into hibernation.

Looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island. England resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kowtowed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bed-ridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its rank. A family with the wrong members in charge.

George Orwell
( written 1941)

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

A carbon footprint the size of the Grand Canyon.

Newquay is the Hawaii of the South-West.

As northern as hotpot and Yorkshire puddings.

Chard is the Kabul of Somerset.

As corny as Kansas in August.

As humid as the chaotic kiln of Bangkok Airport.

Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.

Cecil Rhodes

The parks are the lungs of London.

William Pitt

Violet glanced our way, from behind the protective net curtains of her Englishness.

Disney World is a people-trap operated by a mouse.

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Winston Churchill

As rare as snow in the Sahara.

A Sargasso sea of indecision.

The Irish lady chattered fluently; for us foreigners, we heard only singing.

Manchester is the Shanghai of the North.

A pair of gondolas, as dark as submarines, head down the Grand Canal. Their prows curled like the toes of slippers in a Bollywood musical.

The trouble with American is there are far too many open spaces surrounded by teeth.