The English Spirit

From the dust his three illustrated 'period' studies, The Prince of Pleasure, Victoria's heyday and The Edwardians, Mr. Priestley has added to his fame as novelist, essayist and playwright a new distinction as a social historian. In this new book he does not confine himself to any particular period but takes a long, critical look at the English temperament as it has developed since the Middle Ages. He is concerned with what he regards as essentially English characteristics, and he therefore excludes from his survey Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs, Irish playwrights, Welsh poets, and Scottish painters and engineers. In true-born English men and women he finds very special qualities of mind, purpose and imagination, which he isolates and illuminates with remarkable understanding and often surprising judgements.After investigation of what he calls "The English Secret" Mr. Priestley discusses outstanding Englishwomen, from Dorothy Osborne to Florence Nightingale and Annie Besant. A series of biographical analyses of "Lords and Masters" is marked by a highly personal choice of subjects, which includes not only two great Churchills - Sir Winston and the first Duke of Marlborough - but also such dissimilar characters as Oliver Cromwell and Charles James Fox, Nelson and Ernest Bevin. This is followed by a masterly exposition of the virtues, faults and foibles of "the Uncommon Common People."A long study of Englishness in the arts and in humour and hobbies is characteristically perceptive and entertaining, and the book ends with a series of portrait sketches of characters of an essentially English individuality, and a brief consideration of the future of the English.The book is liberally and imaginatively illustrated, in colour and monochrome, with portraits, conversation pieces, genre paintings, caricatures, and other essentially English examples of art.

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