Hmmm I've just finished reading this book and as someone who is English I don't really recognise a lot of cultural things Paxman describes and I'm not sure that his England is mine, as an example I live in the suburbs of London and don't know anyone whose home has a name rather than a number. Having said that, there are some very familiar things described in the book. But there is, for me, one glaring omission about the inclusiveness of the English culture and how as a nation we have adopted customs and pratices from other cultures such as tea drinking, OK these were cultures we colonised but they have enriched our culture. ( )

I don't particularly like it, but it's hard to say exactly why.

I suppose part of the problem is that our Jeremy can't help going into sneer mode occasionally (anyone who has seen him on TV knows exactly what such a Jeremy sneer looks like). Take this comment about the English and food: 'For the majority of people, eating out is to consume fat-filled fast food, and to eat in, to be the victim of something prepackaged in industrial quantities in a factory somewhere.'

The other problem is that on practically every subject, the outcome is neither one thing nor the other. So the English are as they always were, yet they're also quite changed. They are gentle, kind people, who are also aggressive hooligans, and so on. As an analysis, it lacks clear outcomes.

All that said, it's an interesting and entertaining book. What's certainly true is that there is more focus now on being English. Where once the English tended to label themselves British, we are finally coming out as something individual, with a distinct identity. And that isn't a bad thing. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1106609.ht...

It was very interesting as an intellectual exercise to separate out England and Englishness, to acknowledge the fact that I am an outsider to both, and to consider them as phenomena in themselves. Having said that, I found myself in silent agreement with an awful lot of what Paxman writes about the English attitudes to history, the countryside, religion, sex, food, property and history again - so much so that I'm not going to recapitulate it, just urge you to read the book. There were just two points that jumped out at me as especially thought-provoking.

First, a rather technical historical point, and one that is not original to Paxman. The dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VIII's breach with the Pope, it is argued, had deep effects on England's cultural psyche; a rich mainstream (Catholic) European artistic heritage was literally destroyed forever, and the new concentration on the Word of scripture, translated into English, created the intellectual space for Shakespeare, etc, while England was unable to match the continent in the more visual arts. I suspect one could find plenty of opposing evidence if one wanted, but I sense there may be something there, and I should read more about it.

The second, more general point I picked up from Paxman's book is this: that for many English people, national identity is not something that actually has to be considered at all. Going back again to my Cambridge days, I remember one friend from Essex assuring me, "I daon't really 'ave an accent!" Of course he did, but he had never thought of it in that way; he just though he talked normal, and that I talked funny. We who come from smaller, or indeed just other, countries and nations are constantly (made) aware of our origins when we are in England. Other nationalities (certainly everywhere else I have lived, including even the US) accept that they are themselves a distinct and particular group of people, and that other countries are the same; in England, we visitors sometimes feel that we are weirdly and perhaps quaintly deviating from the default state of humankind, which is only found locally.

("Yet, in spite of all temptations / to belong to other nations / he is an Englishman! / He remains an E-e-e-e-e-e-englishman!")

Paxman then goes on to suggest that because the English sense of Englishness (or Britishness) is poorly or even unpleasantly articulated, it becomes much more difficult to have a rational discussion of European integration. To expand his point, the Belgians, Germans, Latvians, and Portuguese all have a good idea of where they are starting from, so are less worried about and more interested in going down the European track. Going back to Paxman, the British (and that largely means English, with certain peculiar exceptions in the territory where I was born) sense of mission collapsed with economic austerity and the loss of Empire after 1945, without anything much to replace it. Yet paradoxically the civic liberal tradition which is one of England's most admirable contributions to the world makes it almost impossible to construct a replacement national ideology. And even if that were possible, it's difficult to see how the Scots and Welsh might buy into such a project; consider how silly Gordon Brown's recent pronouncements on Britishness sounded, especially coming from a Scot.

Anyway, that's what I thought. I hope none of you English people reading this are offended - I like most of you and I love some of you! ( )

I had quite forgotten that I had ever read Jeremy Paxman's study of the English people, and was thus pleased when Library Thing magically recommended it to me. As far as I recall, I enjoyed this book, though many of its details and points I can't remember. One thing that stuck in my mind, though, is a point familiar to many Brits: the English have something of an identity problem compared to the Welsh and Scottish who help make up Great Britain. And when one talks of Britain and the British, where do the Northern Irish come in? ( )

A fascinating book for an Irishman to read – it seems there is no such thing as a real Englishman, a country on the cultural crossroads of Europe made dynamic by new blood and reinvigorated periodically by the huddled poor and tired masses long before the USA thought to admit a few white folk to its shores. Truly this idea of an homogenised England under one Queen is one of the best fabrications ever to take root. The English aren't bad, like Jessica Rabbit, they were just made that way. ( )