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Read books online for free at This is a review of the Oxford University Press's `Twentieth-Century Classics' edition of 1984 with a ten-page introduction by AN Wilson. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the aged text.
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(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.) About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology. And on this account, Sussex, does a man love an old house, which was his father s, and on this account does a man come to love with all his heart, that part of earth which nourished his boyhood. Dear Sussex, are those women chiefly dear to men who, as the seasons pass, do but continue to be more and more themselves, attain balance, and abandon or forget vicissitude. But, then, I'm not from Sussex.My County, it has been proved in the life of every man that though his loves are human, and therefore changeable, yet in proportion as he attaches them to things unchangeable, so they mature and broaden. It is a novel of its time, certainly - it would be an interesting experiment to write something similar today - but for this reader of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I cannot hand on heart say that Belloc's tale is a riveting good read. Stories and arguments abound between dawn and dusk of each day, or even between dusk and dawn. County places, county people, county traditions, and county lore are all contemplated as the four men journey from east to west. This is all `true', but does that make `The Four Men' a good read? I read it after coming to know the county a little bit more.
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Wilson says that "Belloc knew he was immortalising a world which was soon to vanish forever destroyed not by accident but by human folly." There are words of occasional wisdom too, as Wilson attests, for instance the Poet asserting that the best thing in the world is a compound of "great wads of unexpected money, new landscapes, and the return of old loves." But what of that cataclysm that Wilson refers to in his introduction? Well, the clue is in the timing: set in 1902, but written in 1911, the novel frames the dramatic introduction of the motor car to the Sussex countryside. The work has the occasional amusing moment, especially when partisan prejudices are involved, such as Belloc assuring his readers that whilst fair Sussex and its folk will not suffer on the Day of Judgement, "a horrible great rain of fire from Heaven" will strike all around, "and very certainly Petersfield and Havant, and there shall be an especial woe for Hayling Island." Much of the book consists of each of the four characters telling tales, or "nothing but interminable stories" as one of them complains. In effect, the book is Belloc's homage to "this Eden which is Sussex still." Over the next few days, Belloc tells the tale of a group of four men who walk from this eastern outpost of Sussex to a western one at Harting on the border with Hampshire. The place? `The George' inn at Robertsbridge on Sussex's border with Kent. The novel is set over five successive days, starting on 29 October 1902, or the evening thereof to be precise. In his introduction, AN Wilson asserts that Belloc is not read today because we cannot bear to contemplate his wisdom, "the wisdom of a man who says `I told you so' after the horse has bolted, and who is not entirely sorry to point out that the stable door, far from being better closed, was warped and torn from its hinges years ago." Rather, Wilson proposes that `The Four Men' "is like a series of happy snapshots taken at random before a cataclysm." Indeed, at the end of the journey described in this book, having left his companions to carry on the way, the main character "recognised that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality something had already passed from me." Belloc wrote the book in 1911 when he was forty-one and perhaps starting to feel the intimations of mortality. The novel itself only takes up 162 pages.
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This is a review of the Oxford University Press's `Twentieth-Century Classics' edition of 1984 with a ten-page introduction by AN Wilson.