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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 941.086 EAN: 9780393058468 ISBN: 0393058468 Label: W. W. Norton Manufacturer: W. W. Norton Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: August 18, 2008 Publisher: W. W. Norton Studio: W. W. Norton Editorial Review: Product Description: Dispatches from the new Britain: a slyly funny and compulsively readable portrait of a nation finally refurbished for the twenty-first century. Sarah Lyall, a reporter for the New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches on her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair's New Labor government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privilege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, Lyall's book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic. "The Anglo Files should be handed out, as a public service, in the immigration line at Heathrow." -Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink "When Sarah Lyall married an Englishman and moved to London ten years ago, few around her realized she was a modern-day Tocqueville—otherwise they would have been much more guarded. The happy result is The Anglo Files, a razor-sharp, hilarious, wickedly insightful, decidedly biased account of Everything British."— Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair "Superb social and cultural anthropology by a reporter who has lived among her subjects without losing her sense of wonder for them. Imagine Margaret Mead channeling Jon Stewart and you have Sarah Lyall."—Eric Lax, author of Conversations with Woody Allen "Sarah Lyall brings all the virtues of the best American journalism, including accuracy, to the task of analysing all the vices of British society, including hypocrisy, venality and hopeless confusion about sex. She will now be hailed as one of England's supreme analysts, preparatory to her being executed on Tower Green."—Clive James, author of Cultural Amnesia "For years now Sarah Lyall has been the wittiest observer of the English and their curious habits. Now she's written a book that takes her game to an entirely new level. It's funny, it's delightful and anyone with even a passing interest in these strange people should read it." -Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball "By turns wry, mordant, affectionate, bitter and sweet. I never miss any of her dispatches because, while they manage to remind me why I left, they also contrive to make me feel occasionally homesick." -Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great Average Rating:
 Rating: - A right good show by Yank journalistOscar Wilde once said that the unfortunate thing about rumors is that so many of them are true. Sarah Lyall's ANGLO FILES validates -- in fact, zestily revels in -- many aspects of Modern Britain, how it got that way, and to what extent the old ways still live on, though modified. Many aspects of British life continue to soldier on in some fashion: The House of Lords now contains women, but it mutters and natters almost as much as in the past. Pronunciation is still a giveaway to class ... Read More Rating:  - So why is she there?That is the question I kept asking myself through out the time I wasted reading this book. I too am an American who lived in Britain, albeit not as long as the author has, but I also married a Brit and have been an admirer and studier of their culture for thirty years. I was hoping to learn something new here but instead found reading it an exercise in how to raise one's blood pressure. If life in Britain is as miserable as she would have you believe then why is she still there? My feeling is that this ... Read More Rating:  - The dust jacket is misleadingHaving lived in England for a number of years, I was very much looking forward to reading this book and revisiting a country that I love via armchair. The description on the dust jacket made the book sound much like Bill Bryson's writings on England, humorous and clever. The actual book is comprised of 250+ pages of complaining of things about which anyone who has spent time in England already knows. It rains incessantly...yes, we know. The British are very reserved people who prefer to communicate ... Read More Rating:  - Oh, to be in England!Sarah Lyall has given us poor colonials a wonder, funny, and dead-on accurate depiction of our UK cousins. I literally could not put down this wee tome down until I finished it--laughing much of the way--in a single sitting. Rating: - A subject too good to be so badYes, some of the anecdotes were interesting, but my initial infatuation with the idea of this book was not backed up by writing that was superbly entertaining. Its dry, journalistic style grew boring after only two chapters. In fact, the farther I got into the book, I started to fall asleep after several pages every time I picked it up. And, not to mention, then there were so many opinions espoused that bordered on ridiculous. Because the author is a journalist, her book would have been ... Read More |
