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...story begins with Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister. Englishmen had had country houses before Walpole, of course, but it was he, in the 1720s and '30s. who first used one to bring men together to mix fun and politics. "Up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc.," wrote one of the guests at Walpole's stag affairs, "and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch." As roads and transportation improved, being a guest became more convenient. Women joined the fun, and the weekend house party began its long and bleary-eyed...
...beginning of the end was World War I, and one of the casualties was the servant mentality; the upper class no longer had a lower one to lean on. The country house survived a little longer, and even had a renaissance during the '20s and '30s, when the Evelyn Waugh crowd made elfin sport amid the topiaries. World War II and all that followed it, most notably extortionate taxes and the declining British economy, finally put these gay places to rest. A book like this, which has pedestrian prose but enchanting pictures, is perhaps the best memorial...
...exceeded in noise and enthusiasm anything the Carterites could stage. It was a purely emotional, if not mindless phenomenon. To the assembled delegates, it made little difference that many of the big spending programs he advocated seemed more responsive to the problems of the '60s, or even the '30s, than of the '80s. On this one night he was their man, and they cheered his every word...
Such literary journeying reached epidemic proportions during the '20s and '30s. It would be easier to list English authors who did not write travel books during the period than to name all those who did. These included D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh, among scores of others. The English had always been energetic travelers; the Empire had seen to that. But Fussell thinks that the modern exodus that began in 1918 was different and that the chief difference was World...
...Muppets. No matter: the camera loves Willie Nelson. In The Electric Horseman, he simply leaned back, squinted, expectorated a few down-home aphorisms and stole a scene or two from Robert Redford. Now Nelson has been fitted for a sin-and-suffer role out of a '30s weepie-the Leslie Howard part in Intermezzo, to be precise-and he wears it as comfortably as a pair of custom-made boots...