Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
It's more the culture of cricket, rather than the intricacies of its laws that matters. Wodehouse came from a public (fee paying) school background which saw sport as a way of moulding boys' characters for later life. He always followed his old school's sporting results; - his characters' proficiency, and conduct, at sport says a lot about them.
Henry Newbolt's poem "Vitai Lampada" shows how ingrained this view was at the time, especially with regard to cricket.
http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/i...ces/vitai.html |
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
As indeed does the Duke of Wellington's comment that "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton".
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thanks for the poem, sparrow. i do know that cricket has (had ?) a huge cultural importance in english culture, to the point for example of using the expression "it's not cricket" to express strong condemnation, and i admit to being somewhat awed (and mystified...) by this strange transcendent aura that the sport takes on. i suspect that i'll never quite grasp it, not having grown up with it, but i try to understand it to the extent that it's possible from the outside, when i'm reading about it...