Declining Britain
KNAPPMAN, EDWARD W.
Declining Britain Run It Down the Flagpole: Brit- ain in the Sixties, by Bernard Levin. Atheneum. 451 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Edward W. Knappman Excluding nations defeated in war, ^ Great...
...and from Enoch Powell, leader of British racial- ists, to Tariq Ali, leader of British revolutionaries...
...Levin is not entirely devoid of gen- erous sentiments, as he demonstrates in a moving essay on Winston Churchill's funeral, but the events and personal- ities of the Sixties aroused his more pugnacious instincts...
...Gurus perfected the art of talking gib- berish and were soon hailed as spiritual redeemers by the Beatles and hosts of other disciples...
...Here, to fit the thematic regimen of a long, retrospec- tive narrative, he has stretched and embroidered opinions and ideas that he expressed more concisely and less pretentiously in his columns...
...TOAAMY W. ROGERS is an associate professor in the department of sociology and an- thropology at Georgia Southern Col- lege...
...Each gained and held power by humoring the British public's fantasy that somehow the opportunities of the future might be seized without letting go of the certainties of the past...
...To Levin, the most mystifying re- ligious flip-flop was the conversion of Malcolm Muggeridge from television's resident heretic of the 1950s into its guest ascetic of the 1960s...
...Far too many events are exaggerated to justify his themes...
...His sermons eventually became so fervent and other-worldly that many viewers "lived in the immediate expectation of his assumption into heaven as the Blessed Malcolm, while some claimed that the process had already started, and swore they could see light under his boots...
...Perhaps it was entirely coincidental, Levin admits, that Muggeridge began preaching the celibate route to sanctity shortly after reaching the age when such self-denial becomes less a matter of spiritual fortitude than of medical necessity...
...The political contradictions of the Sixties were demonstrated by two prime ministers with totally opposite platforms, styles, and personalities...
...Such were the miracles of modern alchemy and efficient man- agement techniques that the British could sit back, relax, and wait for the dividends...
...EDWARD W. KNAPP- MAN, formerly an editor of Facts on File, is now free lancing from London...
...Actors and rock singers were soon starving themselves on diets of rice and bamboc shoots and proclaiming the doctrine of "you are what you eat" to the re- porters assembled by their agents...
...BERNARD F. DICK is an associate professor of English literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University...
...His forte is the topical essay...
...They replaced him with Edward Heath, a Tory whose promises were even more extravagant, implausi- ble, and unattainable than Wilson's...
...In religion, art, food, sex, entertain- ment, clothes, and politics, Levin mon- itored the pendulum of popular fancy as it swung more rapidly and radicall) than ever before...
...THE REVIEWERS KARL E. MEYER has worked as a corre- spondent for The Washington Post in Washington, New York, and London...
...He has written two books: "Fulbright" and "The Pleasures of Archaeology...
...Calcutta...
...CHARLES WHITMAN is a Chicago writer with Encyclopedia Britannica whose first book, "Turning Thirty," will be pub- lished next spring...
...Since its last abortive roar at Suez, the British lion has barely had the energy to twitch its tail at the flies...
...Serene and patronizing in words and demeanor, he offered reas- surance that television sets, refriger- ators, and automobiles could be en- joyed by all without revising Britain's Edwardian social and industrial as- sumptions...
...Sensing that amateurism had lost its appeal, Wilson packaged and sold the Labor Party as a firm of management consultants...
...Levin's unpredictable and eclectic issaults insure that he occasionally :ramples on the sympathies of even his most devoted readers...
...As quickly as the rela- tively trifling delusions of traditional Christianity were shed as senseless anachronisms, they were supplanted by the utterly irrational superstitions and hairshirts of more esoteric cults...
...In Britain in the 1960s nothing conventional was toe self-evident to be casually rejected: nothing novel was too absurd to be in- stantaneously acclaimed...
...BERNARD WEINER, formerly editor of "Northwest Passage," is on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle...
...He jabs and slashes away at almost every imagi- nable target from the prosecutor of Lady Chatterley's Lover to Kenneth Tynan of Oh...
...Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson were united, Levin writes, only by "am- bition for power, skill in its pursuit, and a ruthless energy in the struggle to keep it...
...ANTHEA LAHR is a free lance critic who lives in New York...
...Levin would have avoided these pitfalls and a great deal of unnecessary work by publishing a straightforward anthol- ogy...
...During the 1960s, British self-confidence and influ- ence were at their lowest level since pre-Tudor times...
...The conservative Macmillan con- sciously played the role of an aristo- cratic amateur gamely pitting himself against the ungentlemanly professional players of Paris, Moscow, and Wash- ington...
...By the end of the decade, the voters lost patience with Wilson's promises but not with their own self- deceptions...
...Declining Britain Run It Down the Flagpole: Brit- ain in the Sixties, by Bernard Levin...
...In Run It Down the Flagpole: Brit- ain in the Sixties, Bernard Levin has written a caustic, and occasionally per- ceptive, explanation of how his coun- trymen have reacted to their reduced station...
...Reviewed by Edward W. Knappman Excluding nations defeated in war, ^ Great Britain has fallen further and faster from world power than any other nation in history...
...He retired just as this chimera burst...
...But his book will disappoint many who are already familiar with Levin's commentaries in the Interna- tional Herald Tribune and English newspapers and periodicals...
...His team would painlessly transform Britain into a technological wonderland...
...Simultaneous skepticism and ere- dulity were most conspicuous in reli- gious attitudes...
...too many chapters and sub- chapters are introduced with ballyhoo insisting that their subjects were "of great symbolic significance...
Vol. 35 • August 1971 • No. 10
