"Un-English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in these present days—and even amid the scenes whose beauty and whose character Blackmore has so firmly reproduced—I find the parochialism, the self-satisfaction, and the prejudice, which lumps the whole un-English world, with its revolutions, and ideals, and racial problems, under one heading, as "dam-furriners." John Ridd is English, therefore he despises what is not English; he is rather stupid, therefore he despises intellect. "She was born next day with more mind than body—the worst thing ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... painful than to be passed by in a distribution of commendation to which possibly one might lay some claim. If one twentieth part of what has been said is true, if I am entitled to any measure of your approbation, I may begin to think that my public career and my opinions are not so un-English and so anti-national as some of those who profess to be the best of our public instructors have sometimes assumed. How, indeed, can I, any more than any of you, be un-English and anti-national? Was I not born upon the same soil? Do I not come of the same English stock? Are not my family committed ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... orator I will not venture a description. Any attempt to convey an idea of the air of omniscience with which these dreary platitudes are delivered would surely result in failure. It is enough to say that the impression which the noble lord leaves upon an unprejudiced and un-English mind is in all respects painful. Indeed, one sees at a glance how absolutely hopeless would be any finite effort to convince him of the absurdity of his positions or the weakness of his understanding. There he stands, a solemn, shallow, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... who were late, no asking permission of senior officers to leave the table early. Within the hours fixed for meals everyone came in and out as they pleased. There was no special table for the Staff, no rule against bringing evening papers into dinner, no aloofness, no pomposity. The only un-English formalities were the habit of turning and bowing as one left the Mess, if a number of officers were still present, and the universal Italian custom by which a newcomer at his first appearance would walk round and shake ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... be aware that this tendency has produced its evils as well as its good. There is a general complaint that the minds of young women are becoming un-English; that their foreign reading does not merely supply the deficiencies of their English studies, but too often completely supersedes them; that the whole tone of their thoughts is too often taken from French or German writings; that by some means or other, the standard works of English literature ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and burdens at regular intervals. Then men with keen, and often humorous faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly well-dressed wives, and more or less attractive and vivacious-looking daughters, their eager little girls, and un-English-looking little boys, passed through the corridors in flocks and took possession of suites of rooms, sometimes for twenty-four ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... between forty and fifty years; a great beard and mustache concealed the lower part of a swarthy but handsome countenance of rare dignity and severity of outline. His dress was utterly un-English. A vast mantle, with a hood, fell nearly to the ground, and he wore huge courier's boots, which were still splashed, as if from a journey. His great dark eyes rested with an expression of royal benevolence upon the two young people, toward whom he had advanced with a courteous inclination, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... laughable humor, with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last," he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work. Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality; and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... stared, then gave a very un-English whoop, and made a bear rush at Zaidos. When he had finished patting him on the back and stuttering all sorts of inquiries, he managed to make a few questions clear. Where was he going? What for? Who was he going to stay with? When was he coming ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... the full shrug of the un-English child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... hat in a very un-English way, and at the same time, apparently out of respect for his friend, he went so far as to change his seat a little by laying his right knee over the pommel and sticking his left foot into the stirrup, so that he sat like ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... to this all-absorbing national topic, I happen to be one of the most un-English Englishmen living. As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless. Glancing at Mr. Murthwaite, when the bottles had made their first round of the table, I found that he was apparently of my way of thinking. He was doing it very ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the effect "that the food had improved considerably during the last two months." About 300 out of the 4,000 prisoners in this camp were British.[9] At Stendal Mr. Osborne found the thick soup "exceedingly palatable, though thoroughly un-English." The British prisoners "admitted that they could live on the camp rations, if necessary, and still retain good health, as is the case with the Russians, and that their objection to the food was on account of its sameness, and because it was not cooked in an English way." In ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... somebody. Whether it was by punching their opponents on the nose, or whether they used their knives, I hesitate to decide; but I suspect, from the frequent mention of knives and daggers, that sticking one's enemy with cold steel was not so very un-English a practice as popular prejudice is wont to assume it to be. One thing is very certain, and that is—that all over East Anglia, five hundred years ago, there was such an amount of bloodletting in village frays as would ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp |
