Oofy here: Editorial: More on Jane Austen. What about French?
A gloss from the Type-Setter. The perspicacity of our editor brings to his attention a rift to be discerned in the thinking of Humphry Repton and Jane Austen.
Category: Politics
I return to my recent communication (note 296) in response to a particular query from Miss P of Harlaxton who asks what grounds I have for supposing that the Dukes of Rutland drew their sense of themselves from the deep, and probably imagined, past.
The more than distinguished Professor H of Pennsylvania has communicated and in his communication he makes it clear in his by-the-way fashion that when Sir William Chambers described the designs of the master-illusionist, Capability Brown, as little more than a walk around a common field, he meant ‘common field’ in the sense ‘common or garden’, that is, ordinary, everyday.
In a typically roistering effusion, that Red Clydesider and North Briton, the Ha-ha Hero, has challenged me to say what the apolitical Capability Brown, great man of the soil as he was, would have thought about ‘Blue Labour’, a recent, and at first sight unlikely, political fusion between the conservative politician and theorist, Edmund Burke, and socialism.
The history of each individual is more significant to each than the history of his or her culture. The places our parents and grand-parents came from give us some measure of self-confidence for we partly define ourselves by our stock and by the stories we tell of our forebears.
Two scholars, Jay Appleton and Oliver Rackham, have independently found similarities between English parkland and savannah.
Ken from Stroud plans to establish an anarchist commune on Mars and asks how he can create an anarchic landscape to go with it.