[Cronos]

I found this piece compelling and interesting --> The German poet Heinrich Heine, among others, detested them as violent and vulgar. It was only during the reign of William IV—“Silly Billy,” the king before Victoria—that they transformed into something approaching the restrained people whom I encountered as a child and sometimes as a doctor. The main difference between the vulgar people whom Heine detested and the people loathed and feared throughout Europe (and beyond) today is that the earlier Britons often possessed talent and genius, and in some sense stood in the forefront of human endeavor; we cannot say that of the British now.

Before living in England I was a complete Anglophile (my wife insists I still am) - but an Anglophile for a lost, Edwardian England. To me it is a tragedy that England has changed, and not for the better.

This piece by Dalrymple gives a reason why -- and mitch you are correct about increasing socialism

[BenKenobi]

I’m an anglophile myself, and an Edwardian, but for the time of Edward III, not VII. When England was Catholic and proudly so. Before the sadness of the wars between the Lancastrians and the Yorks, and the subsequent disasters of Tudor England, and the Jacobites. When England was ruled, by their own kin, not those from abroad.

[Tax-chick]

William IV, "Sailor Bill," was ridiculed by the Regency elite for being a domesticated bore. I always liked him. (His older brother, George IV, was the beau ideal run amok.)

I thought this was the most telling line: It was instead an existential, almost religious, modesty, an awareness that he was far from being all-important.

There are people who know they are not the center of the universe, and there are people who think they are. The latter are awful to be around, and absolutely catastrophic in large groups.

[Chickensoup]

You must love the Miss Read series. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong century.