English Voices

Lives, Landscapes, Laments

Ferdinand Mount

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781471155987
• eBook ISBN: 9781471155994
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'A sheer delight' Times Literary Supplement Ferdinand Mount has spent many years writing articles, columns and reviews for prestigious magazines, newspapers and journals. Whether reviewing great published works by some of England's finest authors and poets (both alive and dead) including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John le Carré, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Alan Bennett. He also analysed the works of a variety of our Masters covering the past four hundred years such as, of course, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Pepys. Whether it be holding up to account the writings of Winston Churchill, or celebrating the much-loved poems of Siegfried Sassoon, each essay reproduced in full here has been carefully chosen by Mount to weave a unique tapestry of the wealth of writings that have helped shape his own respected career as an author and political commentator. For anyone interested and passionate about writing and poetry across the centuries in the British Isles, this book will be a very welcome guide to the best one can pick up and read.

INDEX

Abbott, Senda, ref1

Abercrombie, Patrick, ref1

Aberdeen, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Ackroyd, Peter, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Adam Bede (Eliot), ref1

Adams, R. J. Q., ref1, ref2, ref3

Adie, Kate, ref1

Adler, H. G., ref1

Adler, Jeremy, ref1, ref2, ref3

Akenfield (Blythe), ref1, ref2, ref3

Alexander, Field Marshal Harold, ref1, ref2, ref3

Allen, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Almost a Gentleman (Osborne), ref1

American Civil War, ref1, ref2

Amery, Leo, ref1

Amis, Hilly, ref1, ref2, ref3

Amis, Jaime, ref1

Amis, Jane, see Howard, Elizabeth Jane

Amis, Kingsley, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 (see also individual works)

cruel streak in, ref1

drinking habits of, ref1

drug use by, ref1

generous nature of, ref1

Jane walks out on, ref1

Leader’s Life of, ref1

marriages of, ref1

memorial service for, ref1

offence given in books by, ref1

panic attacks suffered by, ref1

and sex, ref1

types of book preferred by, ref1

writing style of, ref1

Amis, Martin, ref1

at father’s memorial service, ref1

Amis, William, ref1

Anderson, Benedict, ref1

Angry Young Men, ref1, ref2

Anson, Denis, ref1, ref2

Archer, Lord ( Jeffrey), ref1

Arden, Mary, ref1

Aristotle, ref1

Arkell-Smith, Valerie, ref1

Armstrong, Robert, ref1

Armstrong, Sir William, ref1

Arnold, Matthew, ref1, ref2, ref3

Aron, Raymond, ref1

Arthur Machen (Starrett), ref1

Asbury, Herbert, ref1

‘The Ash Tree’ ( James), ref1

Ashburton, Lord, ref1

Ashcroft, Peggy, ref1

Ashley, Minnie, ref1

Aslet, Clive, ref1, ref2

Asquith, H. H., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 passim, ref6, ref7

and drink, ref1

edited letters of, ref1

general elections ‘won’ by, ref1

and Ireland, ref1

as war leader, ref1

and WW1 declaration, ref1 (see also World War One)

Asquith, Helen, ref1, ref2

Asquith, Katharine, ref1

Asq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Also by Ferdinand Mount
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: The Amphibious Mob
• VOICES IN OUR TIME
• Kingsley Amis: the craving machine
• Alan Bennett: against splother
• Muriel Spark: the Go-Away Bird
• V. S. Naipaul: no home for Mr Biswas
• Hugh Trevor-Roper: the Voltaire of St Aldate’s
• W. G. Sebald: a master shrouded in mist
• John le Carré: spooking the spooks
• Elias Canetti: the God-Monster of Hampstead
• John Osborne: anger management?
• Professor Derek Jackson: off the radar
• Germaine Greer: still strapped in the cuirass
• EARLY MODERNS
• Rudyard Kipling: the sensitive bounder
• George Gissing: the downfall of a pessimist
• Virginia Woolf: go with the flow
• Arthur Ransome: Lenin in the Lake District
• E. M. Forster: shy, remorseless shade
• Arthur Machen: faerie strains
• Fred Perry: winner takes all
• M. R. James: the sexless ghost
• Wilfred Owen: the last telegram
• John Maynard Keynes: copulation and macroeconomics
• DIVINE DISCONTENTS
• Basil Hume: the English cardinal
• The Red Dean
• Charles Bradlaugh: the admirable atheist
• Mr Gladstone’s religion
• The rise and fall and rise of Methodism
• IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND
• Pevsner in Berkshire
• Oliver Rackham: magus of the woods
• The last of Betjeman
• Ronald Blythe: glory in the ruts
• The suburb and the village
• Mark Girouard and the English town
• SOME OLD MASTERS
• Thomas Hardy: the twilight of aftering
• Charles Dickens: kindly leave the stage
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a wonderful leaper
• John Keats: what’s become of Junkets?
• Samuel Pepys: from the scaffold to Mr Pooter
• Shakespeare at Stratford: the divine pork butcher
• THE GREAT VICTORIANS
• Sir Robert Peel: the first modern
• Lord Palmerston: the unstoppable Pam
• Walter Bagehot: money matters
• Lord Rosebery: the palm without the dust
• Arthur Balfour: a fatal charm
• OUR STATESMEN
• Margot, Asquith and the Great War
• Churchill’s calamity: day trip to Gallipoli
• Oswald Mosley: the poor old Führer
• Roy Jenkins: trainspotting lothario
• Denis Healey: the bruiser aesthete
• Harold Macmillan: lonely are the brave
• Edward Heath: the great sulk
• Margaret Thatcher: making your own luck
• Notes and references
• Acknowledgements
• Picture permissions
• Index
• List of Illustrations