“I represent a brand of Toryism, at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the establishment.”
T.E. Utley
“Too often today people are ready to tell us: ‘This is not possible, that is not possible.’ I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.”
Enoch Powell, born 16th June 1912
“All I did, old man, was disguise myself as a tree–that’s correct, a tree–and cross no man’s land to gather a bit of information from the German lines. I have not since been called upon to play a tree.”
Basil Rathbone [born 13 June 1892] on how he was awarded his Military Cross.
My mother, who hates thunder storms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape—dark clouds are lurking there;
But when the August weather breaks
And rains begin, and brittle frost
Sharpens the bird—abandoned air,
Her worried summer look is lost,
And I her son, though summer—born
And summer—loving, none the less
Am easier when the leaves are gone
Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness
I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
Mother, Summer, I by Philip Larkin, pictured with his mother Eva
“If you want to get warm…”
C.S. Lewis
“What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.”
Martin Amis RIP
![themaninthegreenshirt:
“Scott LaFaro [April 3, 1936 – July 6, 1961] was an influential American jazz double bassist, best known for his seminal work with the Bill Evans Trio.
LaFaro died in an auto-mobile accident in the summer of 1961 in Flint, New...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/42b15ad257ce54aa15f3a777936d1d38/tumblr_n48kmvMXB01so28u7o1_250.jpg)
Scott LaFaro [April 3, 1936 – July 6, 1961] was an influential American jazz double bassist, best known for his seminal work with the Bill Evans Trio.
LaFaro died in an auto-mobile accident in the summer of 1961 in Flint, New York, four days after accompanying Stan Getz at the Newport Jazz Festival. His death came just ten days after recording two live albums with the Bill Evans Trio, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, albums considered among the finest live jazz recordings.
LaFaro’s death took an enormous emotional toll on Bill Evans, who was, according to drummer Paul Motian, “numb with grief,” “in a state of shock,” and “like a ghost” after LaFaro’s death. Evans, according to Motian, would play “I Loves You Porgy”, a song with which he and LaFaro became synonymous, almost obsessively, but always as a solo piece. Evans also went on hiatus after LaFaro’s death for a period of several months. Many believe that Evans never fully recovered from the loss.
“England should be owned by the English, and managed for the benefit of the English.”
Robert Blatchford, born 17th March 1851
“Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.”
Hermann Hesse
Sunday Morning
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."
G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton by Joseph Simpson
“Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.”
Burt Bacharach, 12th May 1928 – 8th February 2023
There was a saying, not heard today so often as formerly . .
“What do they know of England who only England know?”
It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma, like Kipling’s Recessional or the state rooms at Osborne. That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realisation is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact. That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead.
And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country.
So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself.
Perhaps, after all, we know most of England “who only England know”.
So the continuity of her existence was unbroken when the looser connections which had linked her with distant continents and strange races fell away. Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt no country but this to be their own. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English who felt there was this deep this providential difference between our empire and those others, that the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her – in modern parlance “uninvolved”.
Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the 18th century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the 17th, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel.
From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their silence.”Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast”.
“What would they say”?
They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection; of the fields amid which they built their halls, their cottages, their churches, and where the same blackthorn showered its petals upon them as upon us; they would tell us, surely of the rivers the hills and of the island coasts of England.
One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible.
They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames, to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called ‘Parliament’; and from that hall went out their fellows with fur trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England.
Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England’s: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.
For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history, the product of a specific set of circumstances like those which in biology are supposed to start by chance a new line of evolution. Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned.
From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation. All its impact on the outer world in earlier colonies, in the later Pax Britannica, in government and lawgiving, in commerce and in thought has flowed from impulses generated here. And this continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles grafted upon it here and elsewhere. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England’s history. We in our day ought well to guard, as highly to honour, the parent stem of England, and its royal talisman; for we know not what branches yet that wonderful tree will have the power to put forth.
The danger is not always violence and force; them we have withstood before and can again.
The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.
Enoch Powell MP, Minister of Health, to The Royal Society of St George, London, St George’s day 1961
![themaninthegreenshirt:
“ John Ruskin [born 8th February 1819]
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/76e3e475fc1e16c19182f780355cca11/tumblr_pmmk7uJRdp1so28u7o1_250.jpg)
John Ruskin [born 8th February 1819]
