I always intended to read this book and when I finally found it in the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Abingdon, I was shocked to find that it had been published in 1998. Good value at £2 too.

In summary this book is essentially a 268 page rant with style being a familiar one: the blunt, forthright style of Paxman the BBC Television Newsnight presenter and inquisitor.

That's not to say that this is a bad book, it isn't and I am happy to have read it. In addition to the 268 pages of text, there are 14 pages of notes and 14 pages of sources and references.

I would say that Paxman has generally used his sources well since the text is peppered with snippets, quotes and anecdotes from down the centuries. After all, many of Paxman's sources are very old.

What is the basic tenet of the book, though? What was Paxman getting at? In essence, I would say that Paxman began this book with a post it note containing his hypothesis that he then stuck in his study that said something like: the English are reserved, cold, passive; stiff upper lip, ours not to reason why, they can bomb the heart out of London but the can't bomb London out of our hearts, Churchill... He then went back to the Norman Conquest and beyond to prove his hypothesis.

Did Paxman prove his hypothesis? Yes, since he never wavered from it. By the end of the book I think that Paxman was probably satisfied that he had proven that the English are reserved and they do have the stiff upper lip and it comes as no surprise that Churchill was relatively recently voted by BBC Radio 4 listeners as the greatest ever Briton ... There are just 11 chapters, covering such topics as

• Funny Foreigners
• The British Empire
• There Always was an England

In support of his thesis, Paxman shows how England's rag bag armies overcome their plight against all of the odds: the French, for example,in one war were well ordered and disciplined and the English were drunkards and slovenly and outnumbered. The English won because, well, they were just better! No surprise there then!

There is poetry and there are nursery rhymes and there are songs aplenty to prove that we are what we are. There is jingoism from William Schwenck Gilbert, as in Gilbert and Sullivan:

For he might have been a Roosian
A French or Turk or Proosian
Or perhaps Ital-ian!
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations
He remains and Englishman

This comes from HMS Pinafore and is well worth listening as well as reading since Sullivan's orchestration is also magnificent!

There is the story of the German Ambassador to London who desperately wanted to overcome what Paxman calls the Kraut bashing of the British tabloid newspapers. So, the Ambassador decided to talk to one of the tabloids to try to set the record straight, only to see this headline following that meeting: THE HUN TALKS TO THE SUN!

One of the central propositions of the chapter on the wife is that prostitutes in England were generally thought of, or at least referred to, as being French. Then there is the general treatment of English women in history: how they leave the dinner table whilst the men discuss topics that the women clearly would not follow. There is also some of the story of the fight to get women into university education and so on. All worthy stuff to be sure; but peculiarly English? Not at all. I was in a country other than the UK recently, leading a seminar: my audience comprised 15 women and 7 men and part way through the seminar one of the men asked me, in confidence, if I thought the women were able to follow what I was saying.

That is the kind of thought that kept coming to me as I read the book: how much of this book really is to the proof or otherwise of the character of the English. In the end I don't think we are as unique as Paxman would have us believe. There is, after all, the human condition. Whilst I do accept the Englishman's home is his castle argument; and it seems true that English people cannot speak to each other in lifts; and we are generally reserved ... our treatment of women is not unique, how we fought our wars is not unique; and it is true that our towns and cities were allowed to be built in a higgledy piggledy manner whilst French and German cities, for example, are drawn to a plan.

By the end of the book, then, I was convinced that Paxman could have either proven or disproven his hypothesis and in the end I believe the English do give off a certain scent but we have more in common with the rest of the world than Paxman has allowed for.

Quality of Writing

With certain writers, I review the book and then make a comment on things in the book that annoyed me. Paxman annoyed me in the respect that whilst writing about the English, he felt the need to be at the forefront of the ruination of good quality writing. Remember that this book was written in the late 1990s: he talks about

• movies and not films
• sidewalk cafes
• standing in line to buy a ticket
• municipalizing the sewage farms
• Sir Walter Scott was hymning the wild romantics,

Finally, how on earth could he make the mistake of talking about the smell of a bonfire in the OCTOBER dusk?

Vocabulary

On the other hand, Paxman does use an extensive vocabulary and here are the words I flagged that I had either forgotten or that were new to me:

• philippic
• quadrivium
• bathetic
• recusancy
• extirpation
• vertiginous
• prelapsarian
• agrestic
• deracinated
• baggataway
• threnody
• caryatids
• contumely
• jeremiads
• solipsistic

 

Duncan Williamson
15^th July 2007