Adrian Buck’s Reviews > English Journey > Status Update

"And I considered how much I disliked Big Englanders, whom I saw as redfaced, staring, loud-voiced fellows wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world, and being surprised and pained and saying "Bad show!" if some blighters refused to fag for them." - Brexiteers appalled that Europeans now refuse to import their fish and financial services?

"Yet Jarrow and Hebburn looked much worse to me than some of the French towns I saw at the end of the war, towns that had been occupied by the enemy for four years" - English industrialists worse despoilers than the cursed Hun.

"May [Norwich] become once more...a city in which foreigners exiled by intolerance may seek refuge and turn their sons into study and cheerful East Anglians" - he's writing about French Protestants: what he would make of Syrian Muslims?

"An even better example [of public spirit of Norwich's citizens] is found in the city's purchase of land all around the edge of town, which is now enclosed in a green ring about two miles wide" - origin of the green belt concept?

"I was shown several varieties of fish here that were quite useless for the home market because the English, even the poorest, won't touch them. They were re-shipped to the Continent.." - no longer an option.

"In spite of so many prophecies to the contrary, we are now less urban than our fathers and grandfathers were; the country gentleman tradition is livelier today than it was twenty-five years ago; and I understand there are far more people hunting now than there were before the war." - the cause of England's de-industrialization?

"These Hull trawlers do not fish the North Sea but sail up to the Arctic and may be away for three weeks." - the collapse of the British fishing industry can hardly be blamed on European competition in British coastal waters.

"It did not seem an English landscape at all. You could easily imagine that a piece had been lifted out of a dreary central region of some vast territory like Russia or America, then dropped on this corner of our island" - i) English landscape has a certain scale. One I guess that it shares with other European countries. ii) Great Britain is an island, but neither the Welsh nor the Scots get a mention.

"During the five years ending in 1931 more than 5,000 people were killed in the coal-mining industry, and more than 800,000 were injured." - Anger provokes statistics, which are otherwise rare in this book.

"If there had been several working collieries in London itself, modern English history would have been quite different" - I wonder if the presence or absence of coal isn't at the heart of the North/South divide.