EBOOK ì EPUB How England Made the English ¶ 9780670919147

DOC How England Made the English

EBOOK ì EPUB How England Made the English ¶ 9780670919147 Ç ❴PDF❵ ✪ How England Made the English Author Harry Mount – Horticulturetrader.co.uk Join Harry Mount on his journey through England as he uncovers the national characteristics behind the English look a liking for old things forNd too like the faint pink Aberdeen granite of the kerbstones; and that precise English mix of air temperature smell and light that hits you the moment you touch down at HeathrowThis book spans new England as well as the rolling hills and patchwork landscape of Tourist Board England the hedge funder's taste for Victorian terraced houses turned into minimalist white boxes; and the steel reinforced concrete that changed the English city horizon England and the English have been shaped by our weather geology and geography; by being a coal rich northerly island off the edge of a vast land m This is a very gentle history of England and the English Do not look here for rough edges thoughtful criticism and review Here you find an England of rose flanked doors respectful tolerance and shy introspection The basic and probably legitimate premise of this book is that the physical nature of land nature and weather formed the idiosyncratic character of the English So England made the English rather than the other way aroundWell that’s a good idea – but how long has England and the English existed? And is what the author identifies as “English” any than the product of Victorian success and 20th Centaury decline? And is a Cornish Englishman the same as a Cumbrian? And do Cumbrians really exist or are they ghosts of Cumberland and Westland? I doubt that “English” is enough of a fixed entity to be able to pin down the factors that make them so to any one time place or environmental factorI don’t think you can have a book that openly admits that the geology of England is varied than almost anywhere else on Earth but still maintain that it is responsible in part for some overarching Englishness Clearly England’s geology has had and still has a profound impact on the economy of the country – but the dead coal villages of NE Somerset and Northumbria are really very very different despite clear but often unacknowledged similarities Now this book is interesting to read – even if I did want to argue with the author on many occasions – but some things really need to be tightened up a bit “Most of us living in the south of England share DNA with pure blood Celts” which would be of great interest if anybody could agree who the Celts were and even if they actually even existed as a distinct people “Bath the only naturally occurring hot springs in England” – really? There are hot springs in nearby Bristol I could go on – but I think I have made my pointBut in the end I think it was the circularity of some of the arguments put forward in this book that I found most hard to cope with A love of ancient ruins is apparently a marker of Englishness because the English countryside has lots of them So where does this start? They are there because they are valued or did they become valued because they were there? So this seems to a flawed maybe inaccurate book which nonetheless does try to look at the now contested ground of EnglishnessI would suggest you try to read a few chapters before you press purchase