England, Their England

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MacDonell was an insider/outsider, a Scottish Wykehamist, a journalist and a partisan Liberal writing with astringent wit about the fusion of reactionary, self-serving Toryism and unprincipled Socialism that underpinned the National Government quietly pilloried throughout the book. The main misgiving is that this is generally just an asortment of set pieces between various bars, cricket pitches and periodicals, with Donald a fairly passive observer. 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.

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Ostensibly about a scotsman coming to London to observe the English in preparation for writing a book about them, it is actually a lovely selection of glimpses into a bygone lifestyle of ill prepared diplomats, country house weekends and sport in its various guises amongst other things. The very gentlest of satire - in fact it's really just a fawning, book-length love letter to the English. Ignoring the casual racism, ( it was written in 1933 ) there are over tones of Jerome K Jerome and P G Wodehouse. 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.

The ending seemed terribly abrupt, as if the author desperately wanted to finish somehow or another. Pen and pencil inscription to front free endpaper, with water drops and a few small nicks along text block edge. 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. England, Their England is an affectionately satirical inter-war comic novel first published in 1933. The fox-hunting chapter is particularly biting, and a masterpiece of "show, don't tell" applied to satire.

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.Gentle, tongue-in-cheek humour about England and Englishness from the perspective of a Scot back in the 1920s. Reprint Society edition hardback; good, lightly aged to page edges, name on fep dated 1941; no dj; UK dealer, immediate dispatch. 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. 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.

A bucolic work, hovering uneasily between sentimentalism and satire, it insists that the real England is that of the shires (and particularly country cricket). 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. If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society. I first came across the book in the 1950's, and still enjoyed the easy humour, and will probably read it again. 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.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.