Word: englished
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...most remarkable thing about the character of the English," said an Indian writer, reviewing the years of British rule in his home country, "is their zeal for writing essays about the English character. This launches one straightway into the melancholy conjecture that self-admiration is the primary British failing...
...people are they," asks the Times, "the oldest of the Old Powers, the youngest-indeed the unborn-of the Newest Powers, starting to challenge Fate again?" There are, it believes, "one or two obvious facts" about themselves which the British tend to ignore: "their ruthlessness, for example. The English in America exterminated one race, the Red Indians, almost completely, and imported another race, the Negroes, as slaves, on whom they inflicted unspeakable brutalities. The English in Australia carried extermination even further ... a good deal of it by the simple use of arsenic, though there were other ways, more horrible...
...Artists. "The English," the Times believes, "are, in fact, a violent and savage race with a faculty beyond all other people of ignoring their neighbors . . . They have a power of poetry which is the despair of all the rest of the world. They produce from time to time personalities transcending ordinary limitations. Then they drive other nations to a frenzy by patronizing these archangels who have come among them, and by indicating that any ordinary Englishman could do better if he liked to take the trouble." Nonetheless, the Englishman "likes to think of himself as a sheep; and so great...
...English carry into almost every department of modern life their great unwillingness to admit facts, their power of pretending that things are not so ... [They] live in cities but they are not citified . . . They are urbane without being urban . . . They can dwell in the midst of 20 miles of paving stones and pretend, with the aid of a back green or even of a flowerpot, that they are in a hamlet on the Downs." Yet this self-deception is not all lost. "Modern England," the Times points out, is "a series of city streets . . . Nine out of ten Englishmen anywhere...
...England, Cary published a sequel, The Horse's Mouth. The story of Gulley and Sara in their old age, it is a wonderfully comic and roisterous novel, tougher and more brilliant than Herself Surprised. Taken together, the two novels form one of the most impressive pieces of English writing in the past decade...