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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31891 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In the early 1990s, New York Times publishing reporter Lyall transferred to London for love. Now she produces the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible genre that dissects British quirks and remarks how peculiar are the inhabitants of that moist little isle. With George Orwell's essay England Your England and Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island the best-known examples, Lyall's is an appropriately humorous tale of the struggle to accommodate to her new British way of life and to make sense of the profound culture shock she experienced. But Lyall's observations are neither overly perceptive nor interesting and much of her material is creakingly familiar: aristocrats, for example, pronounce some words differently than their working-class compatriots, Britons love animals (a special memorial honors animals who aided British troops in wartime) and the game of cricket is boring. This is a light, fluffy read that will be enjoyed by first-time visitors to Britain and even a few nostalgic British expatriates. But while Lyall's writing is, as always, witty and tart, it will disappoint those seeking serious analysis or original insights. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Flying over to London a few weeks ago, I carried a copy of The Anglo Files as a housewarming gift for my stepdaughter and her family, who had just settled there and had lost no time in discovering just how appealing but, well, weird the British can be. Lyall, an American who has lived in England for more than a decade -- she is a correspondent for the New York Times, and her husband, Robert McCrum, is literary editor of the London Observer -- has a keen eye for oddities and a tart prose style for recording them. Thus she tells us that when she arrived in England she was "ill prepared" for the strangeness she encountered: "Even in the twenty-first century, many British people still ride the subway during the evening rush hour without benefit of deodorant. Their nursery-rhyme spider is incy-wincy, not itsy-bitsy. When they sneeze, they say 'ah-tishoo,' not 'ah-choo.' They have something called salad cream, a squirtable mayonnaise product that can be slathered on their food to obscure its unpalatability. When they do the dishes, they appear to believe that the part where you are supposed to rinse off the soap is optional." Like just about everyone who has written about the subject, she makes the obligatory point that "Britain and America are two nations separated by a common language," but then she sallies on to prove it over and over again. The subjects of her 14 chapters include sex, eccentrics, self-effacement, animals, food, class and -- of course -- teeth, this last leading her to the astonished discovery: "Let me repeat that: The average Briton takes one and a half years to use up a pack of dental floss." She has great fun at the expense of both houses of Parliament, especially the House of Commons for its old-school-tie macho silliness. Lyall actually likes and respects the British, but mostly she plays it for laughs, especially where snobbery and class are concerned. My favorite: "When my husband displays to airline check-in clerks the faux-impressive gift I bought for him as a joke at the House of Lords gift shop -- a maroon passport cover with 'House of Lords' stamped on the front -- he often gets upgraded to business class." -- Jonathan Yardley
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
A razor-sharp . . . wickedly insightful, decidedly biased account of everything British. (Graydon Carter )

A witty, incisive collection of essays . . . on everything English. (Elle )

Fresh, funny and occasionally wicked. (Kirkus Reviews )

Lyall is at her tart, observant best. (Matt Weiland - New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice )

Customer Reviews

The dust jacket is misleading
Having 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 by letter, and if forced to interact verbally, would prefer to limit their conversational subjects to the weather...yes, we know. The House of Lords was peopled with hereditary peers who had no true qualifications for serving in office and were often eccentric to say the least...yes, we KNOW. But where, in other writers' hands, those facts have been discussed in a way that still views England with affection, in this book, those same facts are used to make England seem like a place one would never want to visit. Reading this book made me sad and annoyed. I didn't have a problem with the writing itself nor with the facts themselves, but if the dust jacket had provided a realistic idea of what the book was actually like, I would never have bought it. It's not funny in any respect. I think the publishers owe me a refund for false advertising.

As revealing about the author as the subject
To someone who does not know the British this will provide an entertaining, if somewhat alarming, introduction to the subject. Some of the observations are spot-on (cricket and sadly, alcohol - in even small towns every weekend is like Spring Break with drunken teens rendering centres 'no go' areas for those less inebriated). However, other observations seem to be colored more by the author's own prejudices - which are occasionally, but rarely acknowledged. For example, visitors to Britain may be surprised to find most of them have (nearly) all their own teeth. Lyall would have you believe otherwise. And for someone who has married a Brit, and has two British children, a tone of laughing with her subject - rather than at them, might have been less condescending. Finally, in a breathtaking display of ignorance of how the British make tea, the jacket cover shows a tea bag being put in a cup - after a week in London (let alone a decade) every American would know they use a tea pot. While this is not the author's fault, it does betray the problem with the book - the triumph of condescending point scoring over understanding or much empathy.

Spot on!
For anyone who has ever spent an appreciable amount of time in England, as I have, Sarah Lyall's new book, "The Anglo Files" is as close to a perfect look as "one" (Br.) can get from an American perspective. An expatriate for more than a dozen years, Lyall has learned to cope and allowed herself to be educated, all the while shaking her head at how the British live their lives. It's the stuff of a good book.

Each chapter in "The Anglo Files" presents a different topic to be reviewed. Whether it be English men (and their alcohol consumption) cricket, cuisine, the weather or just plain British eccentricity, Lyall covers it all with a sharp wit of observation. My favorite few pages involve her description of the House of Lords. It's hysterical, giving rise to the New Yorker magazine's occasional squib, "There will always be an England".

While much of the book is a gentle poke at British culture and language, the author gets into the psyche of her host country and is dutifully repectful of the way the British "rally 'round"...whether it be in war, or more recently, the death of Princess Diana. Saving this bit until near the end, Lyall reaches a poignant moment and it's one of her best in the book. I highly recommend "The Anglo Files". The narrative is crisp, funny, and I must say, accurate!