"Un-English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires, none of the contrivances to make people laugh—the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... words, instead of being assimilated, as they were in the past, and brought into conformity with the main structure of our speech. And as we more and more rarely assimilate our borrowings, so even words that were once naturalized are being now one by one made un-English, and driven out of the language back into their foreign forms; whence it comes that a paragraph of serious English prose may be sometimes seen as freely sprinkled with italicized French words as a passage of Cicero is often interlarded with Greek. The mere printing of such words in italics ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... the full shrug of the un-English child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away. "He was ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the squire, "but as for that intolerable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English." ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and there were chairs and a table, very slim and polite, with slender legs. The room was extremely bare, but with a bright foreign bareness that was very cheerful, in an odd way of its own. At the end of the polished table a very un-English little boy sat on a footstool in a high-backed, uncomfortable-looking chair. He wore black velvet, and the kind of collar—all frills and lacey—that Robert would rather have died than wear; but then the little French boy was much younger ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... the Nineties Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now, especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For this is the trouble: The cafe is not an English institution and something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence. This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was not altogether grateful to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... continuity: to have continuity you must have age and a hallowed tradition: these we have in everything national, save only in our songs and dances. These, although we are anything but an imitative race, we have imported from un-English lands, with the inevitable result that in dance and music we express everybody but ourselves. We shall go on doing so until the treasure-house of our Folk-music and dances—now for several generations mysteriously closed ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... separates one half of our rooms from the other, while Caterina was arranging the dejeuner under the little acacia arbour in the centre of it. Suddenly Felicie came out from the house, and behind her a tall figure in a large hat and a white dress. The figure held out both hands to me in a cordial, un-English way, and said a number of pleasant things, rapidly, in a delicious voice; while I, with the dazzle of the sun in my eyes so that I could hardly make out the features, stood feeling a little thrilled by the advent of so famous a person. In a few moments, however, as ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... need you think that there would be anything in such a system un-English, or tending to espionage. No uninvited visits should ever be made in any house, unless law had been violated; nothing recorded, against its will, of any family, but what was inevitably known of its publicly visible conduct, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... could convulse the House with laughter while he himself remained to all appearance unconscious of the fun. His voice, pronounced by Gladstone the most beautiful he ever heard in Parliament, was low, rich, melodious, and flexible. His appearance was striking and rather un-English, his gestures were various and animated, and he enforced his points with beautifully shaped hands. If voice and manner could make a public speaker great, Sir Robert Peel might have led the Tory Party; but Demosthenes was right after all. The graces of oratory, though ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... enough in broad daylight, by the uncertain Rembrandt glare of the chamber-candle, its gorgeous palm-leaf pattern and soft folds made a by no means unpicturesque or unbecoming drapery, in conjunction with the girl's grand, soft, un-English eyes, and ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... go into the ethics of the thing. Eavesdropping, some people might call it, and I can imagine stern critics drawing in the breath to some extent. Considering it—I don't want to hurt your feelings, Tuppy—but considering it un-English. A bit un-English, Tuppy, old ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... English notions of the best way of amusing English folk of the sixteenth century. With all its improvements it has no suggestion of the alien about it, as has the classically-flavoured Thersites (also based, like Udall's play, on Plautus's Miles Gloriosus), or Calisto and Melibaea with its un-English names. Perhaps that is why it had to wait fifteen years for a successor. Quite possibly its spectators regarded it as merely a better Interlude than usual, without recognizing the precise qualities which made ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... upon the enemy's line. There was a human tenderness, too, in his way of speaking of his dead comrades, which made me understand why it was that he was so beloved by all who served with him, for, iron-hard as he was as seaman and fighter, there ran through his complex nature a sweet and un-English power of affectionate emotion, showing itself in tears if he were moved, and in such tender impulses as led him afterwards to ask his flag-captain to kiss him as he lay dying in the ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... so sinuous; there is not a stiff line about your movements, you are utterly wicked-looking and attractive, too, and un-English, and what in the world Aunt Katherine asked you here for with those hideous girls I can't imagine. I would not have, if my three angels were grown up, and like them—" Then she showed me the photographs of her ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... that might be made; and when a scheme more comprehensive than that of Sir Rowland Hill for our first Adelaide Corporation, and incomparably better than Lord John Russell's, was first launched into the world, amid many sneers that it was utopian, crotchety, and un-English, he adopted it with an enthusiasm which he knew Jane Melville would approve of. The criticism and the ridicule only strengthened his conviction of the feasibility of the scheme, and his hopes of its success. Jane was sure to be proud if he could be the ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... "Anything un-English is bound to be," she retorted. "I never have liked the English anyway. The last one I knew was an overseer. Dad was compelled to ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... monstrous!' cried the fair man, and with a peculiarly un-English gesture he thrust his ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... tamely submit to such an odious and despotic procedure. To have done so would have been to subscribe to a statute for their own enslavement. Nor may we pass from the consideration of these writs and the resistance offered thereto by the patriots of all our colonies without noticing the un-English ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... in a pretty, un-English sounding voice, with a soft little drawl of the South in it. "I went to see him. They gave us five minutes. A warder was there; but speaking quickly in Spanish, just a few words, he—Mr. Dundas—managed to tell me a thing he wished me to do. ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... the defence to which the nation was wont deservedly to trust; some that they were needless, because no other nation was in a condition to attack us; others that they were disgraceful, because it was un-English and mean to skulk behind stone walls, and because Lycurgus had refused to trust to stone walls for the safety of Sparta; and one member, the chief spokesman of a new and small party, commonly known as the "peace-at-any-price party," boldly denounced the members of the commission ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Mr Vladimir began, with an amazingly guttural intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely un-European, and startling even to Mr Verloc's experience of cosmopolitan slums. "You dare! Well, I am going to speak plain English to you. Voice won't do. We have no use for your voice. We don't want a voice. We want facts—startling ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... England, but the explanations given in the French Assembly soon left no doubt of that. Lord Stanley brought on a debate on the 18th of June. He arraigned the policy of government with an eloquence which was most formidable. He was supported by Lord Aberdeen in a disingenuous and un-English speech. The government was never more feebly defended, and the result was a signal defeat, Lord Stanley's motion of censure being carried by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that the principal incidents of the story are true. It has also been said that Dickens was familiar with them, and at one time purposed to make a novel on the subject; but this statement scarcely seems credible. Such a novel would have been un-English in spirit and not at all in harmony with the ideals of the author of "David Copperfield" and "Dombey and Son." Play and opera at the time of their first production raised questions of taste and morals which have remained open ever since. Whether the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and while he accepted a cup of tea from Mrs. Alwynn, Mr. Alwynn had time to look attentively at him with his mild gray eyes. He was a slight, active-looking young man of middle height, decidedly un-English in appearance and manner, with dark roving eyes, mustaches very much twirled up, and a lean brown face, that was exceedingly handsome in a style to which Mr. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... which he was announced. But he had left the army, so that his reputation for gallantry mainly depended now on his fighting Liberalism in the House of Commons. Even these facts, however, his aspect scantily matched; partly, no doubt, because he looked, as was usually said, un-English. His black hair, cropped close, was lightly powdered with silver, and his dense glossy beard, that of an emir or a caliph, and grown for civil reasons, repeated its handsome colour and its somewhat foreign effect. His nose had a strong and shapely arch, and the dark grey of his ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James |
