Christopher Howse
Men Behaving Courteously
Sorry! The English and Their Manners
By Henry Hitchings
John Murray 392pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Have hat manners evaporated entirely, just at the moment when men’s hats have become fashionable again (trilbies and pork-pie hats in addition to the common baseball cap)? A generation or two without hats have left men with no idea how to use them, no idea even that there should be rules.
I often see tourists walk into my local church in central London quite unaware that they are wearing a baseball cap and that it should be taken off. Perhaps they might be more aware that they should have one on if they wandered into a synagogue. Even less familiar is
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind