England, Their England

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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. All round the cricket field small parties of villagers were patiently waiting for the great match to begin—a match against gentlemen from London is an event in a village—and some of them looked as if they had been waiting for a good long time. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. The joy found in reading this book is heartfelt and merits being kept on hand for the gloomy time when one needs a lift of spirit, well done MacDonell. Reprint Society edition hardback; good, lightly aged to page edges, name on fep dated 1941; no dj; UK dealer, immediate dispatch.

A review of an amateur production in Thursley, printed in The Times in January 1930, notes that he played his role with "immense gusto" which was "vastly to the taste of the audience". 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. The subtle little message of this book is that life's pleasures come from simple pleasures, family friends, etc. 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.

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. If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

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. 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 (". 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 . Macdonell was a regular contributor to The Observer, and was also a well-known broadcaster for the BBC Empire Service. 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 ending seemed terribly abrupt, as if the author desperately wanted to finish somehow or another.

And it was a striking testimony to the mathematical and ballistical skill of the professor that the ball landed with a sharp report upon the top of his head. A very enjoyable experience that allows the reader to escape this angry, money hungry world for a little flight to a peaceful time and place. 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. Whether one reads it as satire or 'takes it straight', the book is absolutely mesmerising - apart from the famous chapter depicting the cricket match which, all too true to life, is interminable.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. 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 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.

Finally, the Kindle edition I had had all manner of typos and odd grammar in the intro, which nearly put me off reading the whole thing. All of these are stereotypes but utterly identifiable as English in a specific time-and-place; this book is now, almost, a Sociological treatise. Although the rest of his books have been largely forgotten, several of them earned accolades during his lifetime. 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. Fun Folio Society edition of MacDonell's gently comic novel depicting England (and village cricket) between the wars.

It is regarded as one of the classics of English humour and is much-loved by readers for its evocation of England between the wars. It's well known for the description of the village cricket match, and deservedly so, but there are plenty of other wonderful chapters: the country-house stay where an eccentric English friend of the hero "helps" him by ringing up and pretending to be various important people leaving messages for him with people who'll be impressed that he knows those important people, leading to conversations which poor Donald finds either incomprehensible or deeply embarrassing; the hotel fire, in which the English partygoers trapped on the roof behave with complete calm under the command of the Major-General; the fox-hunting chapter already mentioned; the episode at the League of Nations, an organization the author worked for at one time, where the English delegate gives speeches that are so careful to say nothing that they get attached to the wrong issues and nobody notices. The cricket field itself was a mass of daisies and buttercups and dandelions, tall grasses and purple vetches and thistle-down, and great clumps of dark-red sorrel, except, of course, for the oblong patch in the centre—mown, rolled, watered—a smooth, shining emerald of grass, the Pride of Fordenden, the Wicket.