Word: englandisms
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...unproductive. The best book on the history of Delhi was written by a foreigner, William Dalrymple. The best biography of the Indian director Satyajit Ray was written by another foreigner, Andrew Robinson. At a time when more and more Indians are writing fiction that gets read in America and England, a disproportionate amount of the informative and scholarly work on India still gets outsourced to Americans and Britons. The sovereign obsession of middle-class India, it would seem, is to be entertained, not to be informed. And that is why Amitav Ghosh might well be the most important Indian novelist...
Next time you hear someone complain they're too busy to be sick, mention the director Mira Nair. When we meet, she's launching a film studio in Bombay, preparing to shoot three movies in India, England and possibly Afghanistan, working on a Broadway musical and creating a film workshop-cum-garden with a view of Lake Victoria near Kampala, in Uganda?all in addition to being a long-distance mother and wife to her family in New York City. Meanwhile, she's been up all night in her Bombay hotel with viral flu and a temperature...
...recognize Becky Sharp. Ever since William Makepeace Thackeray created her more than 150 years ago, she has been the universally recognized embodiment of the social climber, in her case trying to rise out of poverty to a respectable position in a society?Georgian England?more rigidly stratified than any we know. In that delicately poised world, speaking the wrong word, using the wrong fork, could mean disaster, and the suspense in Vanity Fair derives largely from our anxious observation of Becky navigating a vast sea of swells...
...like Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne?of English life in the Georgian era for Becky to master. It is more exotic than Thackeray's, more laden with the booty of a burgeoning colonial empire, but Nair, Indian by birth, is entitled to her opinions about the exploitations on which England's wealth was based...
...dissect his writings for a depth that isn't really there. What is there, as fans can attest, is a timeless, effervescent cocktail of comic juxtapositions, smoothly musical prose and exuberant generosity. "Behind the Drones and the manor house weekends," writes McCrum, "is a sweet, melancholy nostalgia for an England of innocent laughter and song." An England that Wodehouse, after his thoughtless blunder, never saw again...