Kate Fox

I can only assume that an awful lot of other people are equally perplexed by the English – including hundreds of thousands of English people.

Oh – and it probably helped a bit that I obeyed one of the fundamental rules of Englishness, the one I call the Importance of Not Being Earnest.

This was no great hardship for me, as I am very English, find it hard to take things too seriously, and seem to be congenitally incapable of writing even a page without at least one or two little jokes.

Fortunately, enough purist academic anthropologists still thoroughly disapprove of my light-hearted books for me to retain at least some vestiges of my maverick-outsider status.

I make no apology for my continued refusal, in this new edition, to pander to this stuffy minority by trying to show off my extensive reading, command of fancy jargon, mastery of abstruse concepts, ability to obfuscate simple ones, and all the other stuff that might make the book more palatable to them.

And, much as I enjoy trying, when my publishers asked for a revised edition, nearly a decade after Watching the English was first published, I was initially reluctant.

There has been a spate of books bemoaning this alleged identity crisis, with titles ranging from the plaintive Anyone for England? to the inconsolable England: An Elegy.

I am convinced that there is such a thing as ‘Englishness’, and that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated

In the same way, those who are most ‘fluent’ in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the ‘grammar’ of these practices in an intelligible manner.

t my father – Robin Fox, a much more eminent anthropologist