“Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't stand on ceremony. They take people as the are. They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence or scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressible, good-humored, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothing against them.”
—Tom Stoppard
2 comments:
I always get this guy mixed up with Tom Sheppard. This guy's the Brit, right?
A British subject, but actually born Tomáš Straussler in Czechoslovakia, whence, shortly before the war, his his parents prudently emigrated (yay!) to Singapore (oops!). The elder Straussler died in a Japanese prison camp; the widow married Major Kenneth Stoppard at war's end. The playwright has referred to himself as a "bounced Czech."
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