Posted on 10/15/2011 10:04:59 PM PDT by Cronos
You base your opinion of British civility on London?.
Thanks for proving my earlier point.
I do get out of London on occasion. But you’re certainly right in that most of my comments are directed at the English and Londoners. I need to make a better distinction about that—
Yes, we are.
Miss Marmalade seem to base her opinion of the British purely on London. The Scots, Welsh, Irish and Northern and Midlands English, as well as those in the SW and Norfolk/Suffolk areas of England are well known for their friendliness.
LOL
Fair enough, accusation withdrawn, m’lud. lol
I think Caroline and George were too much alike ;-). I’ve seen the Royal Pavilion on tv, but in real life I’ve only visited London and environs and Northern Ireland, where my mother’s relatives live. This was in the early 1980s.
Apology accepted? Taking shortcuts to make points sometimes has a habit of backfiring here on FR.
This one gets a bookmark, excellent find.
It’s a real fantasy land. Brighton is sooo very beautiful as well.
Excellent post. You summed it up perfectly.
I enjoy reading Dalyrmple. He’s a great expository writer. If the no-talent hacks at our American newspapers wrote half as well as Dalyrmple, they might stand a chance of being taken seriously.
bookmark for later
From Wellington on (until socialism came in like a storm in the 50's) the British did have a refined air. They had sort of an understated grace...they had class but didn't flaunt it like the French tended to do.
Of course, such generalizations can't be spread to all classes and all people at all times during the era, but the upper and middle classes did have a very different way about them than the culture of Britain today (again due to socialist policies).
Tudor times were different as were other earlier British eras. But it was Wellington (the post-Napolenic era) which seems to have brought in that "stiff upper lip" way of life.
I’m personally with James Tyrone - the protaganist of Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play “Long Day’s Journey into Night” - who insisted that the Duke of Wellington was an Irishman.
Quite a different breed than, for example, Wilde or James Joyce.
“Being born in a stable does not make one a horse” was the Duke’s famous answer to that assertion!
The Brits are covering the stories that Americans won't do. Possibly because there is less pressure that American Dems can put on Brit publications who do not stay "reasonable".
I don’t disagree. I read those papers everyday. I was responding to a poster who was asking why the Brit papers were covering so many American stories. Some British commenters have expressed frustration with this.
James Tyrone’s idea about the Duke of Wellington (as well as Shakeseare) being Irish always gets a huge laugh in any production of this play. The character is based on the Irish-American actor, James O’Neill, who was the hilariously put-upon father of Eugene.
The two World Wars took the best of British manhood, they never recovered.
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I never thought about it that way - I don’t actually know what portion of the population was lost (%) etc.
I was startled a few years ago when a few British women lamented the hottest British music video at the time featuring a frail looking shirtless young British male singer saying “He epitomizes everything that is wrong with British masculinity - hollow chested, spindly armed” etc. I’d never heard women say that of their own nationality’s men before. (Saturday Night Live spoofed that video with a lithe woman wearing a rubber suit that captured the appearance of a man’s concave chest with breasts. She had facial hair and hit exactly between male and female in the spoof video of the singer who performs a whiny love song shirtless on the edge of a cliff or at a beach. It was well done to the point I sometimes couldn’t tell if the actor in the spoof was male or female. I thought it was John Mayer but can’t find the video.)
But you have me wondering - what portion of sturdy men was lost.
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