'One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,' James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, 'is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.' You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence. This is not, of course, a universally valid dictum. Even the combined and mellifluous resources of Mark Girouard and Yale University Press have yet to unfurl the full panoply of best-selling nostalgia on behalf of such doomed and dodoed delights as education before the comprehensive (Life in the English Secondary Mod?), arithmetic before the pocket calculator (The Victorian Counting House?), American politics before Watergate (The Return to Camelot?) or British politics before Thatcher (Sweetness and Light?). Many such lost causes pass unlamented - more likely to be powdered into dry-as-dust dissertations than instant coffee-table books. We know too much about them to regard their passing with unequivocal regret.

LRB 17 March 1983 | PDF Download