Latest news with #TheWindInTheWillows
The Guardian
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Richard Flanagan: ‘When I reread Evelyn Waugh's Scoop it had corked badly'
My earliest reading memoryMy mother reading Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows to me – and reading it again and again, because I loved it and her. I was perhaps three. We lived in a little mining town in the middle of the rainforest. It was always raining and the rain drummed on the tin roof. To this day that's the sound I long to hear when I relax into a book – a voice in the stormy dark reminding me that I am not alone. My favourite book growing upBooks were an odyssey in which I lost and found myself, with new favourites being constantly supplanted by fresh astonishments. Rather than a favourite book I had a favourite place: the local public library. I enjoyed an inestimable amount of trash, beginning with comics and slowly venturing out into penny dreadful westerns and bad science fiction and on to the wonderfully lurid pulp of Harold Robbins, Henri Charrière, Alistair MacLean and Jackie Collins, erratically veering towards the beckoning mysteries of the adult world. The book that changed me as a teenagerAlbert Camus's The Outsider. It didn't offer a Damascene revelation, though. I was 11. I absorbed it like you might absorb an unexploded cluster bomb. The writer who changed my mindWhen I was 27, working as a doorman for the local council, counting exhibition attenders, I read in ever more fevered snatches Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I had to keep hidden beneath the table where I sat, balanced on my knees. A close family forsaking their son because he has turned into a giant cockroach, after the death of which they marvel at their daughter's vitality and looks? It dawned on me that writing could do anything and if it didn't try it was worth nothing. Beneath that paperback was a notebook with the beginnings of my first novel. I crossed it out and began again. The book that made me want to be a writerNo book, but one writer suggested it might be possible for me – so far from anywhere – that I perhaps too could be a writer. And that was William Faulkner. He seemed, well, Tasmanian. I later discovered that in Latin America he seemed Latin American and in Africa, African. He is also French. Yet he never left nor forsook his benighted home of Oxford, Mississippi, but instead made it his subject. Some years ago I was made an honorary citizen of Faulkner's home town. I felt I had come home. The book or author I came back toWhen I was young, Thomas Bernhard seemed an astringent, even unpleasant taste. But perhaps his throatless laughter, his instinctive revulsion when confronted with power and his incantatory rage speak to our times. The book I rereadMost years, Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude, humane and deeply funny; and Anna Karenina, every decade or so, over the passage of which time I discover mad count Lev has again written an entirely different and even more astounding novel than the one I read last time. The book I could never read againOn being asked to talk in Italy on my favourite comic novel I reread Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. It had corked badly. My fundamental disappointment was with myself, as if I had just lost an arm or a leg, and if I simply looked around it would turn back up. It didn't. The book I discovered later in lifeGreat stylists rarely write great novels. Marguerite Duras, for me a recent revelation, was an exception. For her, style and story were indivisible. Her best books are fierce, sensual, direct – and yet finally mysterious. I have also just read all of Carys Davies's marvellous novels, which deserve a much larger readership. The book I am currently readingKonstantin Paustovsky's memoir The Story of a Life, in which the author meets a poor but happy man in the starving Moscow of 1918 who has a small garden. 'There are all sorts of ways to live. You can fight for freedom, you can try to remake humanity or you can grow tomatoes.' God gets Genesis. History gets Lenin. Literature gets the tomato-growers. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My comfort readOf late, in our age of dire portents, I have been returning to the mischievous joy of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson: 'There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but the laughter and love of friends.' Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is published in paperback by Vintage. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Richard Flanagan: ‘When I reread Evelyn Waugh's Scoop it had corked badly'
My earliest reading memoryMy mother reading Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows to me – and reading it again and again, because I loved it and her. I was perhaps three. We lived in a little mining town in the middle of the rainforest. It was always raining and the rain drummed on the tin roof. To this day that's the sound I long to hear when I relax into a book – a voice in the stormy dark reminding me that I am not alone. My favourite book growing upBooks were an odyssey in which I lost and found myself, with new favourites being constantly supplanted by fresh astonishments. Rather than a favourite book I had a favourite place: the local public library. I enjoyed an inestimable amount of trash, beginning with comics and slowly venturing out into penny dreadful westerns and bad science fiction and on to the wonderfully lurid pulp of Harold Robbins, Henri Charrière, Alistair MacLean and Jackie Collins, erratically veering towards the beckoning mysteries of the adult world. The book that changed me as a teenagerAlbert Camus's The Outsider. It didn't offer a Damascene revelation, though. I was 11. I absorbed it like you might absorb an unexploded cluster bomb. The writer who changed my mindWhen I was 27, working as a doorman for the local council, counting exhibition attenders, I read in ever more fevered snatches Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I had to keep hidden beneath the table where I sat, balanced on my knees. A close family forsaking their son because he has turned into a giant cockroach, after the death of which they marvel at their daughter's vitality and looks? It dawned on me that writing could do anything and if it didn't try it was worth nothing. Beneath that paperback was a notebook with the beginnings of my first novel. I crossed it out and began again. The book that made me want to be a writerNo book, but one writer suggested it might be possible for me – so far from anywhere – that I perhaps too could be a writer. And that was William Faulkner. He seemed, well, Tasmanian. I later discovered that in Latin America he seemed Latin American and in Africa, African. He is also French. Yet he never left nor forsook his benighted home of Oxford, Mississippi, but instead made it his subject. Some years ago I was made an honorary citizen of Faulkner's home town. I felt I had come home. The book or author I came back toWhen I was young, Thomas Bernhard seemed an astringent, even unpleasant taste. But perhaps his throatless laughter, his instinctive revulsion when confronted with power and his incantatory rage speak to our times. The book I rereadMost years, Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud A Solitude, humane and deeply funny; and Anna Karenina, every decade or so, over the passage of which time I discover mad count Lev has again written an entirely different and even more astounding novel than the one I read last time. The book I could never read againOn being asked to talk in Italy on my favourite comic novel I reread Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. It had corked badly. My fundamental disappointment was with myself, as if I had just lost an arm or a leg, and if I simply looked around it would turn back up. It didn't. The book I discovered later in lifeGreat stylists rarely write great novels. Marguerite Duras, for me a recent revelation, was an exception. For her, style and story were indivisible. Her best books are fierce, sensual, direct – and yet finally mysterious. I have also just read all of Carys Davies's marvellous novels, which deserve a much larger readership. The book I am currently readingKonstantin Paustovsky's memoir The Story of a Life, in which the author meets a poor but happy man in the starving Moscow of 1918 who has a small garden. 'There are all sorts of ways to live. You can fight for freedom, you can try to remake humanity or you can grow tomatoes.' God gets Genesis. History gets Lenin. Literature gets the tomato-growers. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My comfort readOf late, in our age of dire portents, I have been returning to the mischievous joy of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson: 'There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but the laughter and love of friends.' Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is published in paperback by Vintage. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
23-04-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
On St George's Day, I'm proud to be a young Englishman - no matter what the establishment trying to destroy our identity says: CHARLIE DOWNES
Ever since I was a boy, I have had the privilege of being immersed in English culture. Whether they realised it or not, my parents gave me the most English childhood imaginable. I grew up in rural Kent and went to a Church of England primary school founded centuries before I was born. Next to it stands a Saxon church more than a thousand years old. Weekends were spent exploring castles, gardens and stately homes; watching Shakespeare at a small local theatre; and holidaying in Cornwall and Sussex, where we enjoyed long walks through fields and ancient woods, picnics on the beach, roast dinners in pubs older than the United States, and tea and scones in quaint tearooms. On the way home, we listened to The Beatles and Oasis. In the evening we watched Fawlty Towers and Alan Partridge, and before bed my father read me The Wind In The Willows and The Lord Of The Rings. And when it came to manners, my parents were positively Victorian. I could not have asked for a better upbringing – and today, on St George's Day, I hope that I can one day give my own children the gift of an English childhood. Until my late teens, I didn't think there was anything particularly remarkable about any of this. It was all I had ever known – it was just England. It was just home. It was only at university that I came to realise that the very notion of this country – everything I love, everything I am – has been under sustained assault by the elites of academia, media and government since before I was born. I remember a professor claiming that anyone flying a St George's Cross was likely a racist – and my peers agreed. It was insulting, given I had that very flag hanging on my bedroom wall. On another occasion, I dared to suggest that migrants living in England ought to have the basic courtesy to learn our language, for which I was castigated by peers and professors alike. It wasn't a debate, it was a Maoist struggle session, in which I played the part of the heretic. This was the early 2020s – a time during which the dual forces of Covid and Black Lives Matter had sent the West into a moral frenzy. Like every other institution, my university prostrated itself before the student body, grovelling in apology for the supposed presence of 'institutional racism' and vowing to challenge 'unconscious bias' and 'systemic inequality'. Yet, it seemed to me that the only tangible form of 'institutional racism' was shown towards the English, given that students and professors alike would regularly engage in Anglophobia without even a hint of repercussions. Meanwhile, I spent my free time doing what I have always done: exploring this great country. Visiting Royal Parks and rural pubs, reading Kipling and Burke, listening to Elgar and Parry. I went into every nearby church and felt the centuries of feet that had stood there before mine. I came to realise that it is no small gift to have been born an Englishman – that my rich childhood had only been possible because of the toil and sacrifice of my ancestors, who were responsible for creating one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever known. Slowly, the salience of my English identity rose. And I am not alone. Though the number of people identifying as English in the 2021 census dropped dramatically compared with 2011, there is a growing contingent of Generation Z who are embracing their English identity – and it is not hard to see why. Since at least the 1960s, Britain – like the rest of the West – has undergone a moral revolution. The triumph of liberal democracy over mid-century fascism elevated individual freedom to the position of ultimate good, and the culture began to attack everything that imposed duty and constraint: family, church and nation. In their place came consumerism, self-expression and identity politics – culminating in the ideology now known as 'woke'. With every traditional source of meaning dismantled, is it any wonder so many young people feel adrift? We are told to find our truth in personal autonomy. But this has not led to fulfilment – only to anxiety, loneliness and despair. Generation Z are the ultimate victims of this worldview – and as we face cultural dissolution, economic collapse and political disenfranchisement, fundamental questions resurface: Who are we? Why are we here? What, now, must be done? We are discovering that it is in those values that mainstream culture has tried to discredit – family, community, nation, faith and duty – where the answers are to be found. And among these, the nation is hated most – especially England. Why? Because it exposes the lie at the heart of liberal ideology. Ordinary people are not interested in abstract liberation. We want stability, purpose and a home where we feel we belong – in other words, we want England. And why wouldn't we? Everything about this country is beautiful – the countryside, the architecture, the humour, the music, the food, the history, the language, the people. This beauty did not come from nowhere – it is the product of my people, the English. Yet the institutions tasked with preserving this inheritance are now committed to its destruction. English culture, because of its global influence, has become invisible to many – its ubiquity mistaken for neutrality. Worse still, our elite's pathological modesty has turned into shame. Englishness is treated as oppressive – or, worse, non-existent – while every other identity is celebrated. At the same time, we are told that England is just a set of 'values', a place anyone can 'feel' a part of, like some cheap costume. It is now common for politicians and journalists to accuse Britain of being a two-tier society – but this is false. It is, in fact, a multi-tier one, with the English at the bottom. The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish are granted devolved parliaments, state recognition and a nominal form of nationalism – but the English? Outside of sporting occasions, power will not even dare speak our name. Every other group is allowed to organise, lobby and demand attention, while we are told our identity is racist. And while our towns are transformed, our history erased and our daughters groomed, we are told to stay silent. Some universities teach students that the English no longer exist, while almost a quarter of the public agree that the English flag is a symbol of racism – which just goes to show how effective the anti-English propaganda has been. Is it any surprise, then, that young people like me – we children of the Blairite education system and the culture wars of the 2010s – are embracing English identity as an act of defiance? If we are going to play the game of identity politics – and we are – then why shouldn't we play to win? Why should we be denied a seat at the table in our own home? England exists. It is not just an idea. It is this land and all of its children – Alfred and Æthelstan, Eleanor and Elizabeth, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin, Austen and Orwell, Elgar and Gallagher, you and me. I am proud to be English, and I will not be lectured to by an establishment that cares nothing for me or my people. We are Englishmen – and today it is time to stand up and act like it.
Buzz Feed
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Older Adults Are Sharing Outdated Traditions They Wish Would Make A Comeback, And I Think I Can Get Behind These 23 Ideas
6. "As both an artist and an avid reader, I miss the beautifully illustrated children's books that were available in my childhood, from The Wind In The Willows (and other books of that era) to the highly entertaining sketches for The Horse With No Head with line illustrations of the poor street kids of a French town and their adventures with a battered metal horse on wheels and a gang of thieves."
