A Field Guide to the British - Hardcover

Lyall, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184724582X ISBN 13: 9781847245823

Publisher: Quercus Publishing, 2008

Synopsis

In 1996 Sarah Lyall, a New York Times reporter, left behind her American roots and moved to London for love. As that newspaper's correspondent in London, she became known here for her witty and incisive dispatches from her adopted country, as she conjured with her new and eccentric countrymen. She also found herself with a ringside seat at a singular moment in British life: the roller-coaster years of Tony Blair's New Labour had inaugurated a battle between the old world of aristocratic privilege and a new world of modern meritocracy. In A Field Guide to the British, Lyall strides her way readably, eloquently and perceptively across the social, political and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain. In a narrative studded with memorable anecdote and rich in humour, she explores themes as diverse as peers, politics, the media, understatement, the weather, and Britain's relationship with animals, alcohol and sex. She ponders such matters as the missing link between the famous British reserve and the famous British hooliganism (could it possibly be binge drinking?) ; how any parliamentary motion is ever passed when the Commons act like naughty schoolboys and the Lords spend two days debating UFOs; and the age-old question of how anyone could possibly enjoy a game as tedious as cricket...A Field Guide to the British is an impressively wide-ranging survey of contemporary British mores from a writer blessed with acute powers of observation and a fluent and readable writing style. Seeing ourselves through Lyall's eyes is sometimes embarrassing, often revelatory - but always very funny. Wry, insightful and engaging, A Field Guide to the British is permeated with a deep affection for its author's adopted country and an unerring eye for its oddities and eccentricities. It is required reading for Anglophiles and Anglophobes on both sides of the Atlantic.

About this title

About the Author

A longtime reporter for the New York Times, Sarah Lyall has been a correspondent in the London bureau since 1995, writing news articles and features. She lives in London with her husband and their two daughters.

From the Back Cover

In her thirteen years married to an Englishman and living in Britain, New York Times correspondent Sarah Lyall has learned many valuable lessons:
History did not start in 1492;
Dick van Dyke's Cockney accent in Mary Poppins was indeed a travesty;
Each statement must be accompanied by circumlocutions, disclaimers, apologies and unnecessarily qualified verbs;
No matter what happens, the correct course of action is to make a cup of tea.
A brilliantly humorous, impressively wide-ranging and compulsively readable account of twenty-first-century Britain from a writer who cast the sceptical eye of the New World on the oddities of the Old.

From the Inside Flap

In 1995 Sarah Lyall, a New York Times reporter, left behind her American roots and moved to London for love. As that newspaper's correspondent in London, she has become well known for her witty and incisive dispatches from her adopted country. Arriving on these shores as Blair's New Labour swept into power, she has witnessed a roller-coaster decade in the life of modern Britain: a frenetic and materialistic time during which the traditional British values of reserve, deference and the stiff upper lip have done battle with the forces of rampant consumerism, overwrought emotion and an invading army of Polish plumbers.
In a Field Guide to the British Sarah Lyall writes with acute insight and razor-sharp humour on the manners and mores, foibles and frailties of the denizens of the small island that she now calls home. Rich in memorable anecdote, it explores Anglo-Saxon attitudes to class, sex, alcohol, animals and the weather; offers some choice examples of the classic British characteristics of self-deprecation, understatement and eccentricity; and examines the many quirks and curiosities of life in contemporary Britain, from salad cream to binge drinking, from questionable personal hygiene to Cornish pasties, and from members of parliament who behave like naughty prep school boys to drinking outside pubs in the rain.
Wry, insightful and engaging, A Field Guide to the British is permeated with affection for its author's adopted country and has an unerring eye for its oddities. Seeing ourselves through Lyall's eyes is sometimes embarrassing, often revelatory - but always very funny. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, A Field Guide to the British is a sparklingly entertaining account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic. It is required reading for Anglophiles and Anglophobes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Edition details

• Publisher: Quercus Publishing
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 184724582X
• ISBN 13: 9781847245823
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288