Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures, 1984-99

by Geoff Dyer

Spine creased, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 1999

About the author

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

Reviews

[Nat]

Dang I loved this. Dyer's writing is way better than DFW's--it is constantly surprising without being mannered. And he makes more interesting observations about England vs. America than I'll be able to remember (though note that drinking "a pint of lager" (p.107) doesn't sound like a characteristic feature of the American desert). I want to just write down some of my favorite passages.

Writing about Robert Capa's photos of the Normandy invasion:
The second thing about these pictures is that they show war as we like to see it, war as it ideally looks: American uniforms, helmet straps hanging loose (from an early age that single detail suggested a casualness, a freedom from restraint that is, so to speak, identifiably American); fighting in trashed sleepy villages. In France. In Summer. (p.43)

Same essay, now talking about Capa's photos of the liberation of Paris:

The (implicitly) gorgeous woman in the centre is kitted out in what, to our eyes, is a wonderful outfit of 1940s retro chic. French Women don't just get dressed up to go to the boulangerie, the picture suggests, they are even immaculately turned out for a spot of street-fighting. What we see here, in other words, is house-to-house fighting of a specifically Parisian kind: café-to-bistro fighting. (p.47)

From the essay "The Airfix Generation", about building models of WWII airplanes:

Looking at Constable's cloud studies in the Tate I find myself thinking how much better they would look with a Spitfire swooping down through the cumulus. (p.141) [Note that Dyer might want to check out Gerhard Richter's Mustang Staffel (http://londonartreviews.files.wordpre...) or most of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay)].

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3-page essays on French or Italian figures or places (Althusser, Cartier-Bresson) or unusual objects of aesthetic attention (Action Man). What we call "research" is just incidental to Dyer - glittering coincidences and correlations fall into his lap as he sets about reading, apparently, everything. He's usually better.

[Jonathan Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect holiday read: short, reflective essays, often melancholy & sometimes laugh out loud funny.

[David O'Connell · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75

[Richard Buckley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed a few of the gems, laughing loudly at the safari and Russian jet adventure, in this mixed back of short stories .

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

So amazing - such a range here - art, photography, literature, jazz - sensational!

[Justin Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much criticism in this volume.