Tuesday 2 December 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests


Global Warning

Wednesday, 9th April 2008

Theodore Dalrymple delivers a Global Warning


Was it ever thus with regard to English ugliness? I do not think that it was. A short while ago I saw a picture in a newspaper of the footballer Duncan Edwards, who was killed 50 years ago in the Munich air disaster. He was signing an autograph book for a schoolboy on a pitch. There was in their interaction a human decency, one might almost call it a refinement, that is very rarely encountered now. And let us not forget that football at the time was a much more exclusively working-class interest than it is now, when every plutocrat avows an allegiance to a team in order to escape the charge of elitism and social exclusivity.

The coarsening of our culture is written in our gestures, in our expressions and on our faces. Anger, suspicion and chronic resentment etch themselves on to our very features, that now require a Breughel, or perhaps even a Bosch, to depict. As you walk down the street, remember what the good Sir Thomas said, and tremble: ‘Since the brow speaks often true, since eyes and noses have tongues... the countenance proclaims the heart and inclinations.’

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