How To Be English

by David Boyle

English culture is confused, muddled and often borrowed. The purpose of this book is to give the reader a complete grounding in the idiosyncrasies of the English and to pin down the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best.

Featured in this book are such established English cultural behemoths as the Beatles, Big Ben and the Last Night of the Proms alongside less celebrated quirks such as meat pies and the working man’s haven, the allotment. Here we celebrate the bell-ringers and Morris dancers, bowler hats (‘the symbol of respectable Englishness’) and cardigans (‘symbol of staid middle-class solidarity’). We examine the brutality of Punch and Judy and our historic love of fairies, once so much a part of the English psyche that they were described as ‘the British religion’.

At once fond and irreverent, laudatory and curious, How to Be English might just teach us how to be English once again.

Genres: Nonfiction, British Literature

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 2014

About the author

David Courtney Boyle was a British author and journalist who wrote mainly about history and new ideas in economics, money, business, and culture. He lived in Steyning in West Sussex.
He conducted an independent review for the Treasury and the Cabinet Office on public demand for choice in public services which reported in 2013. Boyle was a co-founder and policy director of Radix, which he characterized in 2017 as a radical centrist think tank. He was also co-director of the mutual think tank New Weather Institute.

Reviews

[Iryna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read short stories and good selection of facts. However it feels like it’s more for British people sometimes than for those who want to explore this culture. In some places book is overloaded with names of people/films/etc which are not familiar at all.

[Wsclai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anglophiles should not give it a miss. It's an easy read as each entry is only 2 to 3 pages long. Some interesting facts but a bit too much history for me, though it's true that a national psyche is an accumulation of its history.

[Anastasiia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Читала крайне неспешно, растягивала, так сказать, удовольствие.
Милые истории, рассказанные с юмором (английским?), захотелось немедленно поехать в Англию, отправиться в паб и съесть рулета с джемом

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read and lots of history I hadn't read before.

[DONNA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a cute book describing the intricacies of the English! Loved it!

[Svetlana Bulavskaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

100 things to develop a bit of British DNA