from Oxford obituary of Hitchcock today:
",,,,,release from the oppression of a supremacist masculinity
identified with the prejudices of his British upbringing.
Hitchcock's penultimate film, Frenzy, exemplifies these
preoccupations most brutally. Here an early contrast is made between
an idealized vision of England-conveyed through a politician's
quotation of Wordsworth's The Prelude-and the reality of a
crime-ridden city terrorized by the 'necktie' murderer, one of whose
victims is washed up by the Thames at the very moment he pompously
invokes England's glorious heritage. The film recalls Kipling's
phrase about the 'foreignness of England', and offers no eulogy of
London landmarks, but prefers instead, in its concentration above all
on Covent Garden (then in its last throes as the capital's foremost
fruit and vegetable market), to view it as a site of rottenness,
decay, and brutality. "
I found no entry for "foreignness of England" in the Dictionary of
Quotations nor on searching the Journal index . A Google search
produced a recent blog re the term Blighty:
"i'm romanticising a bit here, but i think of people like Rudyard
Kipling, a man who never fit in totally anywhere, but was most
uncomfortable in England. if someone like him used the word "foreign"
to refer to the place from which he came, the place to which he might
never return, unpacking what he really means gets ... complicated. "
Can someone give the origin of the phrase as used by RK?
Bryan Diamond
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