The book we researched and wrote (and rewrote) and worried about and loved is printed and ready to be shipped to you. If you have been reading this blog with some regularity, you may have seen some of the book's subjects online, but not as they appear in the book. We think you'll be surprised and inspired by the ring of gifts you'll see.
If you asked David to tell you about the book, he might say it's full of fantastic British and American history. If you asked me to tell you, I'd say it's personal and spiritual and even mystical because it has had that effect on its pre-publication readers. It includes the story of Christ in Britain as you have rarely heard it told, and explores connections that have long been buried - for instance, why the words free and friend share the same root. Some people will call it subversive of the powers that be, and that will be a good thing. The gifts are good.
The book is rich with the stories of extraordinary men and women, and it's illustrated with 150 images. Yet it's not a huge book. It's 152 pages, hardcover (without a dust jacket), and you can carry it with you on a plane or a train, on a trip or a commute.
Wherever you read it, you will be reading about yourself and about the gifts that belong to you by inherited right, in the beautiful light of your inheritance.
As the Baroness Cox of Queensbury says in the Foreword to the book, Share the Inheritance invokes a vision, one that brings healing and life.
What else do I need to know? Relatively speaking it's not an expensive book. We've tried to keep the price low. But, since it was printed in Britain, shipping it across the Atlantic adds to its price. In Britain it costs £9.99, plus shipping of £3.01. For Americans and Canadians, the book costs $13.99, plus shipping of $11.74. Those are just Royal Mail and box costs. We're packing the books for free.
These are tough times for many of us, but even so 'we do not live for bread alone', and this book is a book to have by your side. We wrote Share the Inheritance to be interesting and accessible to inquisitive adults and intelligent children, and we will be very happy - thrilled - if those of you who are parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and family friends buy it for children as well as for yourselves.
Oscar Wilde observed that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In contrast, you know the value of many things and are likely to know far more than we've been able to include in our book. You will examine the Inheritance we've described with your experience and vision thereby deepening and enlarging our account.
Below you can see the book's Contents - the print in the image is quite a bit smaller than in the book, but it gives you an idea of the subject matter -
You can easily buy Share the Inheritance using the PayPal links below - you don't need a PayPal account. On PayPal you can choose to pay using either your credit card, or your PayPal account.
ORDER UK
ORDER US AND CANADA
Buy Share the Inheritance and we'll ship it straight to you with our best wishes and thanks.
We've been working so hard we've hardly had time to post, but we were delighted to run into a Peter Hitchens interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show, and very glad to learn that Peter Hitchens has received the George Orwell Prize. Here is part of that interview with Hugh - HH: For the benefit of our American audience, the Orwell prize is regarded as the preeminent British prize for political writing. Three are given a year, one for a book, one for journalism, and one for blogging. It is supposed to honor writing that comes closest to Orwell’s ambition to “make political writing into an art.” Had you thought of yourself as doing that, Peter Hitchens?
PH: I don’t know about an art, but I think the idea that Orwell set out making your prose as like as possible to a window pane through which people could simply see what was behind it, has been in my mind every since I encountered his writing many, many years ago. It was certainly a huge delight for me to have any kind of an association with that, that was endorsed by other people, not my own claim, but endorsed by other people, particularly given that by his nature as a hero of the left, his, the prize in his name tends to be awarded to the left by the left. And on this occasion, it went to me, a conservative. So I have to say that it was one of the more pleasing moments of my life. . .
Hitchens is especially interested in the cultural revolution in Britain, which he thinks is a horror. We don't think Peter is always right, but he has fascinating things to say about Dickens and CS Lewis and science and, yes, God and 'the people who don't want there to be a God'. Why do they want that so badly? Note that the transcript reads Thomas Cromwell when it should read Thomas Cranmer, and read the whole thing.
Worth reading, including the countdown of fliers at the end of the video.
Christopher Howse writes - The ideal pub has a large proportion of regulars, no amplified music – so it is always quiet enough to talk – barmaids who call everyone "dear", a good fire burning, a plain dining-room upstairs, pub games in the public bar, and a garden. This is not my idea, but George Orwell's, and he was right.
The George and Dragon in Hudswell, on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, has gone one better by setting up a library, run by volunteers. To tell the truth, the whole pub is run by volunteers, like the village shop in Ambridge and other resorts of countryfolk. They know that life hangs together with a local pub, shop, school, church and library. . .
We can't see the point of novels in a pub - we'd miss out on the characters sitting around us - but we like the idea of reference books, for the questions that pop up. Sitting in the local pub close to the Shawford Station, we wonder whether the amazing Stephensons built railway lines in Hampshire.
Christopher Howse mentions the people who gave us libraries for free. Passmore Edwards was one. Entrepreneur industrialist Andrew Carnegie, 'who founded 660 libraries in Britain', and hundreds more in America, was another. As a little girl, Cat used to visit one of the community libraries established by Carnegie. Outside of trees, and climbing them, it was her favourite place to be.
No apologies for taking an interest in a man who shares my surname, shares some of my politics and may become the next Prime Minister of Australia, when Aussies work out what they're going to do with a hung Parliament. You know his name - Tony Abbott. He appears to be a passionate conservative and a brave defender of the Australian Constitution.
Daniel Hannan argues that the Internet is blowing a life-giving wind on Britain and moving her from the stifling embrace of the EU towards the Anglosphere, where Britain naturally belongs.
The Internet makes it as easy for my constituents to do business with a company in New Zealand as with a company in Belgium. Easier, indeed, because the Kiwi company shares our common law, accountancy practices, commercial traditions and language. . . . The Internet, as Douglas Carswell argues, is ironing out a kink in our cultural and political alignment, whereby a small elite artificially reoriented our foreign policy, our trade and even our news cycle away from our old alliances and towards Europe. That’s the great thing about the web (or, from a Europhile perspective, the disagreeable thing): it democratises.
We can hope.
The surge in Britons seized under the controversial "no-evidence-needed" European Arrest Warrant and exported for trial abroad like so many pieces of bacon, makes chilling reading. Those are the EU ties that bind, and it will be a strong wind that breaks them.
Thanks to both Instapundit and National Review for the link.
If you read garden literature you have read about dilatory gardeners, no-show gardeners and gardeners with black thumbs. Unlike these poor examples of a gardeners, a remarkable man came to the garden yesterday. He knew reams about the lore of field and stream; what the foxes were doing; how a masse of eels had died of disease and sunk to the bottom of the Sargasso Sea, leaving hungry otters around Shawford; how to cure the roses of black spot; how and when to pickle walnuts after piercing the soft shell with a needle; and why the courgettes wouldn't bear - only male flowers had appeared. Further he could and did dig, through six inches of topsoil down through hard, flinty soil, and he easily transplanted nine large plants, while sustained by three cups of hot, strong, sweet tea. 'No need for lunch. I've eaten a good breakfast,' he said. His name is Aly. Where he lives is a mystery, but somewhere outdoors. He has no phone - arrangements for Friday's session where made on a river bank, where we had met him watching the water and drinking a beer. Landless (it's presumed), he owns the county if knowledge is wealth, for he knows many people here, the land they own and how they acquired it and what happened to that land in the last century and a thousand years ago.
He seemed to me a countrymen in the ancient and glorious British tradition of countrymen.
The ins and outs of them from the Barrister.
Image
'. . .The great air battle which has been in progress over this island for the last few weeks has recently attained a high intensity. It is too soon to attempt to assign limits either to its scale or to its duration. We must certainly expect that greater efforts will be made by the enemy than any he has so far put forth. Hostile air-fields are still being developed in France and the Low Countries. It is quite plain that Herr Hitler could not admit defeat in his air attack on Great Britain without sustaining more serious injury.
'If, after all these boastings and blood-curdling threats and lurid accounts trumpeted around the world of the damage he has inflicted, of the vast numbers of our Air Force he has shot down, so he says, with so little loss to himself, after tales of the panic-stricken British crouched in their holes (laughter) cursing the plutocratic parliament which has led them to such a plight - (laughter),- his whole air onslaught were forced tamely to peter out, the Fuhrer's reputation for veracity of statement might be seriously impugned. (Loud laughter.)
'We may be sure, therefore, that he will continue as long as he has the strength to do so and as long as any preoccupations he may have in respect of the Russian Air Force allow him to do so.
'On the other hand, the conditions and course of the fighting have so far been favourable to us. I told the House two months ago that whereas in France our fighter aircraft were wont to inflict a loss of two or three to one upon the Germans and in the fighting at Dunkirk, which was a kind of no-man's-land, a loss of about three or four to one, we expect that in an attack on this island we should achieve a larger ratio. This has certainly come true. (Cheers.)
'It must also be remembered that all the enemy machines and pilots which are shot down over our island, or over the seas which surround it, are either destroyed or captured, whereas a considerable proportion of our machines and also of our pilots are saved, and many of them soon again come into action.
'A vast and admirable system of salvage directed by the Ministry of Aircraft Production, ensures the speediest return to the fighting line of damaged machinery. At the same time the splendid, nay, astounding, increase in the output and repair of British aircraft and engines which Lord Beaverbrook has achieved by a genius for organisation and drive which looks like magic - (cheers) - has given us overflowing reserves of every type of aircraft and an ever-mounting stream of production both in quantity and in quality. (Cheers.)
'The enemy is, of course, far more numerous than we are, but our new productions already, as I am advised, largely exceed his, and the American production is only just beginning to flow in. It is a fact that after all this fighting our bomber and fighter strengths are larger than they have ever seen. (Cheers.)
'We hope and believe that we shall be able to continue the struggle indefinitely and as long as the enemy pleases, and the longer it continues the more rapid will be our approach first towards that parity and then into that superiority in the air upon which in a large measure the decision of the war depends.
'The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world except in the abodes of the guilty goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unweakened by their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and their devotion.
'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. (Prolonged cheers.) All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aims their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often at serious loss, with deliberate, careful precision, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. (Cheers.)
'On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers, who will play an invaluable part in the case of an invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meantime on numerous occasions to restrain. I have no hesitation in saying that the process of bombing the military industries and communications of Germany and the air bases and storage depots from which we are attacked, which will continue on an ever-increasing scale until the end of the war and may in another year attain dimensions hitherto undreamed of, assure one at least of the most certain, if not the shortest, of all the roads to victory. Even if the Nazi legions stood triumphant on the Black Sea or indeed upon the Caspian, even if Hitler was at the gates of India, it would profit him nothing if at the same time the entire economic and scientific apparatus of German war power lay shattered and pulverised at home.' (Cheers.)
-Winston Churchill, speaking to the House of Commons, to the British people and to the world 70 years ago today.
When you answer life's questions, you, too, may become one of the Few in your own time.
|
