{"id":154,"date":"2004-02-03T12:40:00","date_gmt":"2004-02-03T12:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=154"},"modified":"2019-05-27T15:56:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T15:56:45","slug":"the-berry-scene-by-dornford-yates-1947","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2004\/02\/the-berry-scene-by-dornford-yates-1947\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Berry Scene by<\/i> Dornford Yates, 1947."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK, I was wrong&#8211;this isn&#8217;t the dregs either. (I still have <i>As BBBerry and I Were Saying<\/i>, which must have in condensed form the awfulness I thought was spread among these 3.) Of course there are the typical DY cliches, more pronounced with time; and as he aged, the ability of his characters to forsee WWI long before 1914 became more striking. He&#8217;s the ultimate believer in national stereotypes, with French characters always confessing that the English are &#8220;the best in the world.&#8221; Berry on the gathering clouds of the Great War: &#8220;[The Germans have] hated us for years, because they know that we are better than they.&#8221; &#8220;They hate us because we are free,&#8221; anyone? But there are some classic moments too, like the steam roundabout that plays &#8220;Daisy Bell&#8221; at top volume and speed, the American caricature Coker Falk, of Chunkit (&#8220;See here, Junior, when Coker Falk says &#8216;Mine,&#8217; wise guys throw in their hands&#8221;), and some great courtroom scenes. Cousin Boris is a broader, less funny, and totally unsympathetic copy of Nancy Mitford&#8217;s Cedric Hampton (<i>Love in a Cold Climate<\/i>)&#8212;interesting to me for that parallel alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, I was wrong&#8211;this isn&#8217;t the dregs either. (I still have As BBBerry and I Were Saying, which must have in condensed form the awfulness I thought was spread among these 3.) Of course there are the typical DY cliches, more pronounced with time; and as he aged, the ability of his characters to forsee [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}