Matthew Engel
Teoksen Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain tekijä
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Tekijän teokset
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 4 kappaletta
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1963 - current 2 kappaletta
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Yleistieto
- Kanoninen nimi
- Engel, Matthew
- Virallinen nimi
- Engel, Matthew Lewis
- Syntymäaika
- 1951-06-11
- Sukupuoli
- male
- Kansalaisuus
- UK
- Ammatit
- journalist
writer - Organisaatiot
- The Guardian
Financial Times - Lyhyt elämäkerta
- Matthew Engel has had a journalistic career of unusual variety, covering everything from terrorism to tiddlywinks. He has reported from 50 countries and seven continents, clocking up No. 7 in January 2012 when the FT sent him to the Antarctic. For 12 years, he was editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. His latest book is Eleven Minutes Late, a dissection of Britain's railways. He is now writing travel books about England.
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- #30,605
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- 63
Unlike Dominic Sandbrook, who seems to regard most of post-war British history as a necessary but unfortunate prelude to the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s New Jerusalem, Engel has no ideological axe to grind. He certainly doesn’t ignore the bigger political picture but there is a strong focus on everyday life. He covers a longer period than Beckett but lacks the panoramic sweep of Kynaston (surely the best of the bunch). And he’s a lot more fun than Lord Hennessy.
Humour is actually Engel’s USP in this overcrowded market. He has a sardonic wit that often had me giggling inanely to myself and which enlivens even the over-familiar stretches of the narrative. He also has a tendency to make ex cathedra pronouncements based on little or no evidence. At one point he discusses a survey published in 2004 by the New Economics Foundation which found that Britons were never happier than in 1976. This has been the subject of heated debate among historians. The 1970s was, after all, a decade of runaway inflation, mass unemployment, industrial conflict and IRA bombs. Engel solves this contentious matter by simply declaring all such surveys ‘nonsense’. I expect some readers will be infuriated by this somewhat cavalier approach; personally, I rather admired his cheek.
Engel was born in 1951, so he lived through the period under discussion; an advantage in this kind of history, I think. He isn’t really an historian at all - he’s a journalist and has a journalistic instinct for the good story which illuminates an entire era. In 1959 the jockey Emmanuel (‘Manny’) Mercer was killed when he was thrown from his horse before the start of a race at Ascot and kicked in the head as he fell to the ground. This is how the spectators were informed of his death:‘The stewards regret to announce that the last race has has been abandoned as E. Mercer has been killed’. And that was that - end of announcement. As Engel observes, the poor man wasn’t even given the dignity of his first name, and the only regret expressed in this breathtakingly terse statement was for the cancellation of the next race. Upper lips don’t come any stiffer than that. I think it is safe to say that Britain has become a more emotionally intelligent and less chillingly formal society since then.… (lisätietoja)