Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist (1). Here, the crown they are fighting for belongs to the White King which, given that they are on the White side as well, makes their rivalry all the more absurd. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence.

The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell | Goodreads The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell | Goodreads

There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. edition, hardback, 8vo, 127pp, owner's name on endpaper, page edges browned, text clean and sound, grey cloth, green titles, spine browning, corners slightly bumped, Good condition / no dustwrapper.At bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader.

The Lion and the Unicorn - Wikipedia The Lion and the Unicorn - Wikipedia

Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. The lion and the unicorn as they appear on both versions of the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact.

The Lion And The Unicorn - George Orwell, Book, etext The Lion And The Unicorn - George Orwell, Book, etext

After eight months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had got to do: first, to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent invasion. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’.It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. England Your England - Orwell describe the essence of Englishness and records changes in English society over the previous thirty years or so.