Little England

Patrick Wright

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places by David McKie
Atlantic, 359 pp, £16.99, March 2006, ISBN 1 84354 132 7

In 2000 the Royal Institute of British Architects hosted a public meeting at which various contenders for the new office of London mayor were invited to argue their case for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would soon ditch his campaign and carry him off to jail. Instead, the irrepressible huckster proposed to take advantage of London’s recently introduced system of ‘red routes’ by establishing a new super-fast bus service tailored to the needs of his busy friends in the City. He envisioned a fleet of sleek new vehicles, equipped with modem-ports and work stations, which would enable the nation’s champions to sail back and forth without being fouled by the lesser movements of their fellow citizens.

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[*] Cape, 288 pp., £14.99, June, 0 224 07497 0.

Vol. 28 No. 17 · 7 September 2006 » Patrick Wright » Little England (print version)
Pages 19-22 | 5831 words

Letters

From Anthony Chadwick

Perhaps it doesn’t appear on the road signs that Patrick Wright sees on his way through Rutland to Nottingham (‘where I teach’) from wherever it is he lives (LRB, 7 September), but England’s smallest county has a motto that dovetails with Douglas Goldring’s view of Little England: ‘multum in parvo’. It is printed in suitably small type on the signs that greet drivers hurtling along the A1. Incidentally, reading Jeremy Harding’s Short Cuts – inset on Wright’s piece – about the glowing example set by the prime minister when it comes to trimming carbon emissions, I couldn’t help wondering whether Wright shouldn’t do his bit for the atmosphere by moving across Rutland permanently to live a little closer to his place of work?

Anthony Chadwick
Leicester

From Patrick Wright

I shouldn’t have named Ford Madox Ford among those who persuaded Douglas Goldring out of his initial enthusiasm for the First World War. Ford was not the otherwise unnamed ‘influence’ mentioned by Goldring in his autobiography Odd Man Out. Indeed, he was strongly in favour of the war against Germany.

Patrick Wright
Cambridge

From Sara Haslam

Ford Madox Ford was not, despite what Patrick Wright says, strongly in favour of the war against Germany, at least not at first (Letters, 21 September). In September 1914 he called the war a ‘hideous and unrelieved pall of doom’, and in his poem ‘Antwerp’, written the following month, he grieves with the ‘women of Flanders’ for those they have lost. His opinion changed over the next months, perhaps in part because of German atrocities in Belgium, and he was certainly committed to the war effort to the extent that he agreed to write (somewhat idiosyncratic) propaganda for the War Propaganda Bureau in 1915.

Sara Haslam
Banbury, Oxfordshire