New York Times Bestseller
Read an Excerpt
Introduction: Lunch with an Earl
Dispatches from the new Britain: a slyly funny and compulsively readable portrait of a nation finally refurbished for the twenty-first century.
Sarah Lyall, a young reporter for the New York Times, move to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches from her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair’s New Labour government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privelege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige, Lyall’s book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic.
NPR Morning Edition (Sept. 23, 2008)
Interview with TIME Magazine (Sept. 4, 2008)
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Published by W. W. Norton & Company, August 2008
$15.95, 304 pages, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-393-33476-0
