Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
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- ISBN13: 9781857885088
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A bestseller in the UK, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and regularly hilarious look English Society. Putting the English national character under her anthropological microscope, Fox finds a weird and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments-even using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig-Fox discovers what these unwritten codes tell us about Englishness.
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Written by an English anthropologist about her own nation’s behaviour. There’re some appealing explanation on why British ppl are so uneasy socializing, talking about money and may sometimes talking in the opp way (hypocrisy). While many of the explanations suggested by the leader are convincing, I establish persons behaviour not unique to the British, they can be experimental in our Chi society as well! So it’s useful in understdg ppl’s behaviour.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This product came exactly has described. No problems, fantastic condition, not ruined by the mail.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Not exactly a rivetting read, this is a rather repetitive of account of one social anthropologist’s attempt to characterize the quirks of the ‘English’ character. While claimig to take in all bases, the emphasis is on ’suburbia’ and, despite a struggle to avoid this, the tone is irredeemably middle-class.
The popularity of this book is hard to know, but this reviewer suspects that the appeal derives from a readership that is itself both anglophile and ‘middle-class’ in outlook. The expression ‘ango-saxon attitudes’ springs to mind!
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The book is really WONDERFUL. I tried to read it in Russian, but translation was so poor. That’s why I chose to get an original one.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Have you been watching?
For heaven’s sake, it’s been 25 years since “Brideshead Revisited” (1981) was on PBS! The 11 episode British miniseries was so enchanting I couldn’t miss a week: the haunting theme composition, the deep, cultivated voice of narrator Jeremy Irons, the huge, stately English country house, Oxford university, the tale.
And “Inspector Morse” with John Thaw, all 33 episodes on PBS “Mystery!” (1987 to 2000). To grasp the clues, I permanently felt I needed to watch one more time, but never did. One day, if I live long enough, maybe I’ll go back — to the smart, cranky character, his sidekick Lewis, the vintage red Jaguar, the Oxford setting, the complications.
More recently, “Masterpiece Theatre” had “Bleak House.” Really, a year ago! What characters. What interactions. What scenes.
There’s something about persons English. Yes, we’ve been watching them, and listening. So has Kate Fox, a cultural anthropologist, leader of “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour.”
Dr. Fox is in her mid-forties, pretty, slim (her English pub nickname was “stick”). She was also watching, questioning, and taking notes for her book, all over England for over a decade. She is co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford.
You can see a fetching picture of her on their Web site [...]
“Watching the English” is no dull, arcane literary treatise. The writing is lively, humorous, and intelligent. You will end up with a detailed picture of all persons English classes and their identifying traits — the effective classes, the middles, the uppers, the landed gentry, the crowned heads, even the Queen. What they’re doing, what they’re adage, how they jostle one another. Predictable! Reasonably!
Nearly anyone can identify a British accent. After Miss Fox, you’ll have insights into everything else about the English that makes them English.
You’ll see what distinguishes the classes from one another and from the rest of us. The excellent and not so excellent. Nothing is off limits: pubs, houses, furnishings, meals, cars, trains, clothes, make-up, children, schooling, sports, flirting, the bedroom, work, holidays, weddings, funerals, emotions, attitudes, public behavior (okay, “behaviour”).
Miss Fox is a lengthy, thorough, and rewarding read. Three cheers!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5