England, Their England

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But MacDonell’s strongest work was the much less pleasing Autobiography of a Cad, which merits reassessment accordingly. 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.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. 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 (". He was a keen sportsman and a first-rate golfer, representing the Old Wykehamists on a number of occasions. 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. 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.

Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. 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. Gentle, tongue-in-cheek humour about England and Englishness from the perspective of a Scot back in the 1920s.

A bucolic work, hovering uneasily between sentimentalism and satire, it insists that the real England is that of the shires (and particularly country cricket).It’s an easy read, no central plot, a bit like a series of short stories in each location or scenario but where the central theme is a Scotsman trying to understand what makes the English so . Moments of decent satire and occasionally - when he stops fannying around and dials down the panto silliness - a little lyrical. 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. The fox-hunting chapter is particularly biting, and a masterpiece of "show, don't tell" applied to satire. It has already faded a lot in the six weeks since I read it, but the one large thing I am taking away from it is an introduction to the work of J.

All of these are stereotypes but utterly identifiable as English in a specific time-and-place; this book is now, almost, a Sociological treatise. I bought it having read a short positive critique of it by John Carey in his book The Reluctant Professor. Chapters on cricket, the Geneva of the League of Nations, fox-hunting, golf, country-house parties, politics and so on are described by appealing young Scottish war veteran Donald Cameron.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 book is written as if a travel memoir by a young Scotsman who had been invalided away from the Western Front, “Donald Cameron”, whose father’s will forces him to reside in England. 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. I was left with the impression that Donald thinks that the English are kind largely because he is kind. If the book has a fault, it's that it's very much about its own time (which is also a strength, if you're interested in getting an insight into that time), and a lot of the contemporary references have lost their resonance in almost a century.

I can't even remember where this was mentioned or recommended now, but it has stood the test of time well and was readable on its own merits and not just as an insight into inter-war England. England, their England, a now forgotten bestseller, was one of a series of travelogues produced by survivors of the First World War during the 1930s in a country recovering its sense of purpose and identity; unusually, in this case it took the form of an autobiographical novel. I somehow came across it mentioned as a pointed Scottish 'take' on the English, but it's really an affectionate and unfalteringly loyal letter of love. 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. Banished from his native Scotland by a curious clause in his father’s will, Donald Cameron moves to London and decides to conduct a study of the English people; a strange race who, he is told, have built an entire national identity around a reverence for team spirit and the memory of Lord Nelson.Although the rest of his books have been largely forgotten, several of them earned accolades during his lifetime. The first chapter (which is set in France in WW1) is excellent, genuine satire and I only wish it carried on in this vein. 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. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. 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.