Success Quote by Nigel Dennis

The punch here is the faux-politeness: “I would never dream” isn’t humility so much as a velvet-gloved jab. Nigel Dennis, a British novelist with a talent for social satire, is performing a kind of imperial-era etiquette where restraint becomes a weapon. The sentence is structured like a compliment to American sovereignty (“your wildlife”), but the real aim is to mock a particular sort of American entitlement: the assumption that the world is an open-air theme park, available for consumption, documentation, and bragging rights.

“Going to The States” carries an old-world crispness, as if America is a brash new venue one visits to observe a spectacle. “Photograph your wildlife” is the kicker because it collapses two meanings at once. Literally, it evokes safari-style tourism and the camera as a tool of capture. Figuratively, “wildlife” can read as the unruly, exoticized natives of someone else’s country - a sly inversion of how Western travelers have historically described other peoples. Dennis lets the reader decide which sting to feel first.

The context is mid-century travel culture, when cheap flights and glossy magazines made the act of seeing-and-recording into a status move. Dennis’s line pushes back against that with weaponized manners: he’s not refusing to go; he’s refusing to participate in the gaze that turns places into trophies. It’s a one-sentence critique of tourism as soft conquest, delivered with the kind of dry understatement that makes the indictment land harder.