Books: The old English politeness is harder to find today.

Sorry No More

Peter Whittle

Sorry! The English and Their Manners, by Henry Hitchings

 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $28)

The queue—that is, standing in line—has long been valued as a characteristic of English manners, both by outsiders and by the English themselves. As an example of social cohesion, an illustration of that much-celebrated (and much-satirized) English sense of fair play, it’s pretty much unimpeachable. It’s been said that one Englishman standing alone is enough to constitute a queue.
That was then. Anybody visiting London today will wonder where the queue has gone. It might still exist in provincial towns and rural communities, but here in London, the once jealously enforced public tradition of “waiting your turn” is on life support. One can see this especially at bus stops, where the crocodile line of patient passengers has given way to a slow-motion scramble. And nobody seems to mind much.

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Peter Whittle is founder and director of the New Culture Forum, a columnist for Standpoint, and author of several books, including Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain and Monarchy Matters

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