Welcome to Litsy!

★★★★☆

Recommended by Paul Kingsnorth, a favourite author.

I liked it, but it wasn't as good as I hoped. A lot of interesting ideas were raised but they weren't quite tied together to my satisfaction. It felt like a long, wandering magazine article.

While reading, I remembered that I had written a short paper on this same subject for my 9th grade geography class decades ago. I should see if I can find it...

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'The rivalrous nature of [England's] politics - Whig versus Tory, Labour versus Conservative - is only one manifestation of the nation's either/or tendency. Other nations accommodate many voices and conduct their politics through many parties. England, impatient with such nuances, prefers a stark, polar opposition: yes/no, rich/poor, private/public, north/south, in/out.'

'Medieval outlaws were a genuine menace - England's woods were full of poachers, few of them friendly - yet Robin [Hood] is invariably polite, merrily tweaking the noses of the rich as he tosses their purses to the poor.'

'The most dedicated chronicler of England's weather and the way it shaped English people was Thomas Hardy. The labourers in Tess of the d'Urbervilles are not just in the countryside; they are part of it, tuned to the natural world as if they were musical instruments.'

'And though he had seen tropical storms with his own eyes, [Joseph Conrad] drew a typically English axiom from the central incident of "Typhoon", written the same year: "Facing it, always facing it. That's the way to get through."'

[Regarding the English colonisers of Australia]:
'Some were scurrilous, some high-minded; some were crooks, some saints. Either way, they were all drawn to distant horizons. If Victorian England sometimes seems staid and ultra-conservative, it might be because its racier children could not wait to leave. It was a land peopled by stay-at-homes.'

'Many factors contributed to the emergence of [England's] canals.... But nothing would have been possible without the water that fell from the sky. Now it was carrying goods around the country.... By the middle of the 19th century, a single drop of rain that fell in Seathwaite could trickle down the Shires until, one day, it passed beneath London Bridge and out to sea.'

'The past is never simple. We need to pack at least two minds when we travel into England's history, and prepare to contemplate it with mixed feelings. That is certainly the case with the medieval spirit that lingers on in the nation's cathedrals, castles, wool churches and ruined monasteries. These are now England's top visitor attractions, but we cannot forget that those knights... carried cruel swords, and were not afraid to use them.'

'The spirit of the allotment lives on in the English love affair with the back garden. All across the country, every day, people reap and sow, prune and mow, seed and dig their little patches of well-watered ground. The very word 'garden' comes from the Old English 'garth', meaning a plot of enclosed land.'

'Modern England is so strewn with the debris of the past that we may be forgiven for ignoring it. Walk along the Thames path at Rotherhithe and you pass the outline of an Edwardian manor house - a stone building that once overlooked the river. It belonged to Edward III [1312-1377], not Edward VII [1841-1910]. Yet it does not feel out of place between the wings of a modern housing estate.'

'No one could build an abbey overnight. [The Cistercians] who laid the foundations needed a loving belief in a brighter future and a patient sense of self-sacrifice, since they knew they would never see the end product of their labours. Their keen sense of the endless, fluctuating passage of time gave them immortal longings, and made them unusually industrious.'

'Nature moves in mysterious ways, not all of them natural.'

'The cultural impact of [Bede's] work is hard to overstate. For instance, it is chiefly thanks to him that England is so called, as a different monk might have seen things from a Jutish or Saxon perspective, rather than the Anglian angle. And it was Bede's use of 'anno domini' to describe the years after the birth of Christ that established this as the accepted notation. ⬇