Sorry! The English and their Manners by Henry Hitchings

Another getting-ready-for-England book. This is a study of the history of manners, particularly those of the English (duh, as the title makes clear), and how those manners have originated and morphed over the centuries. Hitchings also makes some broad claims about the English culture and persona as a whole, which I felt was interesting for me to read as an American, and comparing the difference between how we view things. It was really interesting reading about how people wrote about and viewed manners in the previous centuries, and how those manners changed over time, and who were the big contributors to those changes.

I feel like what this book needed was a good editor. This could have been a lot more interesting and well organized. It definitely rambled a bit and I was itching to reorganize things for him, add headers to sections, and shorten it down--because there was a lot of interesting information just thrown together without having much structure. Maybe I've been spoiled by recent non-fiction books, but most of them that I've read lately have had a clear structure, with an obvious progression through the book, different topics for each chapter, and headers dividing up topics within each chapter. This one basically had none of those things. He kind of went through historically, but then had random chapters that were out of the chronological order on specific topics, and went off on tangents within chapters that were never connected in very well. Overall, I skimmed the last half of this book and got what I think was worth it out of it. I feel like I could have summarized this better if it had been written better, because it's hard to even remember what was written in all of it.