Foreign Eye
ONE of the troubles about Mr. Huizinga's book is that it did not really need a foreigner to write it. Mr. Huizinga is a Dutch journalist who has lived in England for many years; for much of that time he has been a professional commentator on the English scene for the Dutch press, and the English he writes has no strange flavour other than that of old-fashioned journalism—a taste for rhetoric, for example, and an irritating love of extended and rather whimsical metaphors. But the substance of his book, too, could well have been written by an Englishman, from the observa- tions on the peculiar anomalies of English pride, puritanism and hypocrisy to the attacks on Britain's fence-sitting about European Union and her official policy over Suez. Where are the 'confessions' here? Mr. Huizinga's method of collating quotations from British newspapers and Hansard and stringing them together with obser- vations on their arrogance, hypocrisy, fatuousness, etc., tells us no more than we know already : that much that is published in the press and said in parliament is arrogant, hypocritical, fatuous, etc.
It is a pity, because Mr. Huizinga begins well, at the point where he should begin : with himself, and his first reactions to living in England. But almost from the start he seems to have lived in the world of the metropolitan journalist; and—apart from a brief, and nicely observed, excursion into Society—he has stayed there ever since. He admits that he knows very little of what lies outside Lon- don, and I would guess that even in London his gaze does not stray far beyond Westminster and Fleet Street. Perhaps I am doing Mr. Huizinga an injustice, in a way; for as an indictment of certain governmental blunders and blindnesses, this is a reasonable enough book (though the recent goings-on in France make one less convinced of the reasonableness of complete European Union); but as the Confessions of a European in England,
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