England, Their England

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It's interesting as a time capsule of a period and place that no longer exists (and includes the racism and sexism from that time), but I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected. It closes with a sentimental chapter set at Winchester, where the author (but not his character) went to school, in which one of the boys (or "men," as they're known at Winchester; this particular man is about 12 years old) explains that a piece of terminology used at the school is based on something that used to happen "until quite recently," and when pressed clarifies that by this he means 70 or 80 years ago. Mind you, sir, in 1914 the nation and all its honour was giving me twenty two shillings a week and I was working seventy four hours a week for it.

G. MacDonell’s England, their England', in Gerard Carruthers, and Colin Kidd (eds), Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts ( Oxford, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic , 18 Jan. There are chapters that focus on a single aspect of English life including The Dinner Party, The Cricket Match, The Golf Club, Parliament, Theatre, The Hunt, The Pub for example.

The very gentlest of satire - in fact it's really just a fawning, book-length love letter to the English. There is a sarcastic aside of the Great War definitely being the last one (I paraphrase) so it appears to be quite astute as well. One of a genre at the time, the novel examines the changing nature of English society during the interwar period. As a device to examine his subjects it worked, but the best books combine the observational humour with a good narrative too and tend not to end so abruptly. There are some marvelous characters, too: the English landowner who, after agreeing with his wife that they won't collect the full rent (or, in some cases, any rent) from tenants who are having a hard time of it, insists vehemently that he's a good businessman; the Yorkshire engineer who has been all over the world delivering machines and teaching the recipients to use them, sometimes for years at a time; the varied literary eccentrics; the secretly virtuous film star, true to the precepts of her father, the vicar; the noncommittal trio of young men who work at the League of Nations, and whose answer to any question is "yes and no"; the young man and woman, siblings, who have no topics of conversation and only one adjective at any given time (currently the adjective is "grim").

England, Their England is an affectionately satirical inter-war comic novel first published in 1933. A lot of the time, he has no idea what is going on, what his English acquaintances are talking about, or why they are doing what they're doing, but he struggles on as best he can. The book popped up in my GR recommendations because I recently read “Three Men in a Boat” and this indeed has a very similar type of humour.Macdonell was a regular contributor to The Observer, and was also a well-known broadcaster for the BBC Empire Service. Shakespeare Pollock sprang into the vortex with a last ear-splitting howl of victory and grabbed it off the seat of the wicket-keeper's trousers. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Macdonell also wrote six mystery novels under the name 'Neil Gordon', one of them in collaboration with Milward Kennedy.

I put this on my to-be-read list sometime last year and promptly forgot about it, so when I came across it again, I wasn't quite sure why I was reading it, but what I found was a lovely, gentle, whimsical satire which is well worth a read.

It hit the right spot at the time and became a bestseller, and has endured as a classic of humour, transcending the passage of time.

But you can generally pick up from context what's being referenced, at least in general terms, and the Wikipedia feature on my Kindle was helpful in many cases too. The subtle little message of this book is that life's pleasures come from simple pleasures, family friends, etc. The book, he is told, is to be about the English, their social life and their related institutions, and written in such a way as to be enlightening for foreigners.Billed as social satire, this book is more like an extended love letter to the idea of Olde England, although there are one or two chapters, notably the one on fox hunting, that I would count as actual satire. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Genuinely witty in its observations and phrasing, with hilarious set-pieces and mostly affectionate portraits of a dozen varieties of eccentricity and oddness, this is a book for fans of Wodehouse and Jerome K. If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.