I often have occasion to quote Robert Graves, who said, “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” I quote this in my music criticism, when discussing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example, or Verdi’s Traviata.
I thought of it last week, when reading two blogposts that quoted George Orwell. They both appeared on the Telegraph’s website, and they appeared on the same day. I read them within five minutes of each other. The thing about Orwell? He really is very good.
This post quoted the following dead-on sentences:
. . . the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. . . . England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
Does all this ring familiar to you, here in 2011?
-read on at link-
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