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Article: IN THE 'GLORIOUS REVOLUTION' OF 1688, HARDLY ANYONE WAS KILLED, AND PEACE, PROPERTY AND PARLIAMENT WERE SAFELY PRESERVED From the barons to the Greenham Common women, does English history really have a rebellious streak running through it? asks Noel Malcolm
- Article from:
- The Sunday Telegraph London
- Article date:
- July 26, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2009 The Sunday Telegraph London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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DISSENT
The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking, from the
Normans to the Nineties
By David Horspool
VIKING, pounds 25, 453 pp
According to George Orwell, writing in
the 1940s, the English were distinguished from other peoples by a
whole range of qualities, including their 'gentleness', insularity,
inability to think logically, 'unconscious patriotism' and devotion
to private life.
Above all, he thought, they had a 'respect for constitutionalism
and legality'. Murderous violence, whether personal or political,
was not their way of doing things: 'the outstanding quality of the
English is their habit of not killing one another'.
Orwell was not given to sentimentalism or ...