英文解釈教室の出典を探る(46)

Chapter 7 It …that…

例題7.3.2

イギリス人は保守的（肉を切らせて骨を断つ？）

The Englishman learns by his mistakes, when once he is convinced of them; but it is only the brutal evidence of hard facts which will convince him, and, until these hard facts hit him in the face, his doggedness will make him hold on. It has been said that the English lose all battles and win all the wars; and it is only after he has lost a certain number of battles that the Englishman changes his tactics.

出典：Philip Carr: "The English are Like that", 1941.

（参考1）

（参考2）イギリス人論まとめ

例題 2.2.1 （同著）
…But the Englishman also has a keen eye to business. Napoleon contemptuously called us a nation of shopkeepers, and what he then intended as an insult remains true today, when it is so little of an insult that the people of every nation would like to be shopkeepers also. No Englishman can readily bring himself to let an opportunity for doing business pass him by and he will seize those opportunities,…

例題 5.3.
The outstanding characteristic of the English people is good humour, and that, however adverse circumstances are, we seem able to maintain. It is a great strength.
George Orwell. The English People (1944)

例題 12.1.2 （出典不明）
…It has so often been said that the English (though not the Scots, the Welsh, or the Irish) are an inartistic and unimaginative people, that the English have themselves come to believe the accusation. They are told that they have no vision, that they are more concerned about their pockets than about their minds and souls. Since they are a modest and a docile people, full of self-distrust and slow to give offence, it seldom occurs to them to point out that the English have had not only the greatest poet of all time but also more great poets than all other countries put together.