The English

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In this book, J. B. Priestley takes a long, critical look at the English temperament as it has developed since the Middle Ages. He focuses on what he regards as essentially English characteristics, excluding Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian monarchs, Irish playwrights, Welsh poets, and Scottish painters and engineers. He identifies very special qualities of mind, purpose, and imagination in true-born English men and women, illuminating them with remarkable understanding and often surprising judgments. After investigating what he calls "The English Secret," Priestley discusses outstanding Englishwomen, from Dorothy Osborne to Florence Nightingale and Annie Besant. A series of biographical analyses of "Lords and Masters" includes a personal selection of subjects, such as Sir Winston Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, Oliver Cromwell, Charles James Fox, Nelson, and Ernest Bevin. This is followed by an insightful exposition of the virtues, faults, and foibles of "the Uncommon Common People." A long study of Englishness in the arts, humor, and hobbies is perceptive and entertaining, and the book concludes with portrait sketches of characters embodying an essentially English individuality, along with a brief consideration of the future of the English. The book is illustrated with portraits, conversation pieces, genre paintings, caricatures, and other examples of English art.