Continuity under threat

This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title. The suggestion is that the author has been forced to rummage among the wreckage that is England in order to find something, anything, that is still intact. Its origins and intentions are quite the opposite.

As Richard Ingrams explains in his short introduction, when he was editor of Private Eye he published a regular feature called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’, written by John Betjeman — a suitable kind of investigation for a satirical magazine. When, in 1992, he founded The Oldie, a feature called ‘Unwrecked England’ written by this author, Betjeman’s daughter, was precisely intended to redress the balance, to express enthusiasm, and this is what her Oldie pieces collected here triumphantly do. Caught on the journalist’s tag of her column’s title — which Oldie readers will recognise and rejoice at — a wider readership, which it deserves, might be deceived.