England, Their England

Product Information

I've worked on the land all my life, and the least I've ever earned is four and six a week and the most is twenty nine shillings. The Welshman's theory is that they are a nation of poets (which is what many people would say about the Welsh); Donald thinks, at least at one point, that they don't have a national character, "they're all different". OK - it pokes fun at the English from a Scottish point of view which ought to be edifying for those of us on this side of the pond.

Reprint Society edition hardback; good, lightly aged to page edges, name on fep dated 1941; no dj; UK dealer, immediate dispatch. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. An important character is Mr Hodge, a caricature of Sir John Squire (poet and editor of the London Mercury), while the cricket team described in the book's most famous chapter is a representation of Sir John's Cricket Club – the Invalids – which survives today. Macdonell was a regular contributor to The Observer, and was also a well-known broadcaster for the BBC Empire Service.If the purpose of this book is to escape and live in a world that does not exist anymore, the goal is achieved. Which means we do not get the humor, those of us that live outside the Anglo- Saxon world and are unfamiliar with its attitudes - even if we have read the chef d’oeuvre Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by magical Angus Wilson http://realini. 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. Here and there are sprinkled reminders of the cataclysmic 14-18 war but there are no indications of the worse one coming in a few short years.

Pen and pencil inscription to front free endpaper, with water drops and a few small nicks along text block edge. 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. I was reminded of Wodehouse's Psmith in the City, where the viewpoint character visits Wodehouse's old school (which is not the character's old school). The scenes include a country house weekend, a visit to the theatre, cricket and rugby matches, a voyage to Danzig, the village pub, political meetings (". But they are probably mad, and definitely (in many cases) kind, although he doesn't shy away from highlighting the exceptions.Minus points: the book is of its time so not particularly enlightened or PC - to be avoided if you are easily upset.

Set in 1920s England, the book takes the form of a travel memoir by a young Scotsman who has been invalided away from the Western Front, "Donald Cameron", whose father's will forces him to reside in England. 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.

England, Their England is an affectionately satirical inter-war comic novel first published in 1933. 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. Written in the mid-30s, we are given a view of an older, more bucolic, more assured England; a country that knows its place at the head of a huge Empire and yet whose own history as an agricultural land is just beneath the surface. Macdonell also wrote six mystery novels under the name 'Neil Gordon', one of them in collaboration with Milward Kennedy.

All of these are stereotypes but utterly identifiable as English in a specific time-and-place; this book is now, almost, a Sociological treatise. With many sparkling comic moments, this book somehow manages to combine brilliant satire with warmth, even sentimentality. The fox-hunting chapter is particularly biting, and a masterpiece of "show, don't tell" applied to satire. Clean and firmly bound decorated cloth boards similar to a modern Wisden design, in a plain light brown slipcase with a little fading and a few marks.

I went to a school founded 5 years before I started there, so by the time I left I had witnessed half its history to that point, and the country I was born in was only founded in 1840, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like to go to a school with such a depth of history. A bucolic work, hovering uneasily between sentimentalism and satire, it insists that the real England is that of the shires (and particularly country cricket). Gentle, tongue-in-cheek humour about England and Englishness from the perspective of a Scot back in the 1920s. But very, very much 'of its time' (quite entertainingly racist at points), dated and just, well, tiresome.