Word: englishmen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Throughout a remarkable lifetime as an influential member of the royal family, as an acclaimed combat hero and strategic planner in World War II, Lord Mountbatten's considerable qualities indeed seemed larger than life. He appeared to embody, if anyone could, the very model of what Englishmen cherish as their national character. As French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing eulogized after the assassination last week: "He personified British courage, dignity and elegance...
...Butlers bought the house shortly after World War II, the garden now blooms with some 300 varieties of flowers, shrubs and trees. Other amateur gardeners stop by to ask for cuttings and to trade notes on lush hybrid ivy. Such a bower well fulfills that dream of true Englishmen expressed in 1664 by Poet Abraham Cowley: "I never had any other desire so strong ... as that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden...
...idea that individuals have rights that government should not infringe was an article of faith with "freeborn Englishmen" as far back as 1215, when a group of barons sat King John down to sign the Magna Carta. So there was considerable irony in the fact that an international court, born out of the Holocaust to prevent the rise of another Nazi Germany, solemnly declared last week that Great Britain had failed a basic test of human rights. Free expression, ruled the 20-judge European Court of Human Rights, had been denied by a longstanding English law that stifled the press...
...Englishmen who fought at Ypres and the Somme carried the Oxford Book of English Verse in their haversacks; such literary brigades in the trenches would find their minds chiming with a line of Keats, or William Dunbar's Timor Mortis Conturbat Me. The Americans in Viet Nam usually packed more kinetic cultural effects. Images given them over the years by movies and television would sometimes unreel in their brains as they moved toward a tree line or a Vietnamese village, and in bizarre synaptic flips between reality and pictures, they would see themselves for an instant as, say, Audie...
...marvels of this century that the Germans did not conquer Britain in World War II. To this day, Englishmen wonder how they would have fared and behaved as an island extension of the Third Reich. The premise of Len Deighton's absorbing new novel is that there would always have been an England, even under Nazi rule...