Lovely Bits Of Old England

Product Description

John Betjeman began writing for the Telegraph in 1951 & continued to do so for a quarter of a century. During that time Britain underwent profound social & cultural changes. In architecture grand Victorian edifices were pulled down to make way for gleaming brutalist monuments to the Future. In literature a new generation of angry young men (and women) challenged convention head on. In music pomp & circumstance gave way to the electric guitar. & in fashion hemlines crept up. Amongst much of the population however such rapid change met with disquiet: a nagging sense that the New had displaced much that was wonderful in the Old. By turns eccentric wistful & polemical Betjeman's writing for the Telegraph gave voice to this unease. From contemporary reviews
- often refreshingly caustic
- of novelists such as Ian Fleming Nancy Mitford & J.D. Salinger through prescient warnings about the threat posed to the English skyline by office blocks motorways & concrete lamp-standards to elegiac paeans to Norman churches & of course the gothic majesty of St Pancras station Lovely Bits of Old England collects the very best of Betjeman's contributions to the Telegraph for the first time. Taken together they offer a eulogy for what was lost & an impassioned defence of the past in the face of progress's relentless onward march.