Archive for Englishness and British national identity

‘What perspectives do the British bring to bear when they think of China? And how much of that distant land, once known as legendary Cathay, do they actually see, beyond their own prejudices…?’

Over the years many people have tried to list the essential characteristics of Englishness, but what about the sense of threat and danger that so often serves to frame such lists? I wrote this article for Made in England, a website based on a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England and launched on 23 April 2008

‘Mr. Money-Coutts evidently belongs to the “keep a bullet for the woman” school, and has no doubt shot his way out of many a tight corner among the savage nomads of Hertfordshire…’

A correspondence from The Times, London, 20 November - 2 December, 1935.

‘Television producers sometimes speak of the ‘golden hour’ – that time in the late afternoon, when the sinking sun casts even routine landscapes into brilliant relief. But the early twentieth century photographers who interest Hauser had a different interest in such tricks of the light…’

About Kitty Hauser’s book Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology & the British Landscape 1927-1955, Oxford University Press, £65. This is the ‘pre-print version of a review published in the journal Twentieth Century British History.

In June 2007 I attended a conference entitled ‘Passionate Natures’ at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University. The event, which drew together conservationists and literary commentators, was highly suggestive. Helen MacDonald was among the organisers, and this blog, recommended with some (slight) embarrassment, offers a memorable reflection on the issues at stake.

Ostensibly a review of David McKie’s book, Great British Bus Journeys, this is actually about Douglas Goldring, a pacifist, conservationist and bus-travelling founder of the Georgian Group, whose idea of ‘Little England’ was inspired by the example of Ireland’s Sinn Fein movement. Published in the London Review of Books, 17 September 2006, pp. 19-22.

On national identity in Britain’s 2005 general election campaign, and the persistence of G.K. Chesterton’s idea of the English as a ’secret people’. This is a revised version of ‘Last orders for the English Aborigine’, also available on this site. Published under the heading ‘Drunk but free’ in Guardian Review, 9 April 2005, pp. 4-6

On G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and the English as a ’secret people’. This article is an expanded version of a talk presented at the National Heritage Lottery’s Conference, ‘Who do we think we are; Heritage and Identity in the UK Today’ (held at the British Museum on July 13, 2004). An edited version was published in Soundings, ‘After Identity’ Issue, No. 29, Spring 2005, pp. 21-34. An abbreviated version (also available on this site), additionally adjusted to address the rhetoric of the Conservative Party’s election campaign under Michael Howard, appeared as ‘Last orders’ in the Guardian Review, 9 April 2005, pp. 4-6.

In the mid-1930s, and in response to the horrors of aerial warfare as waged by imperial powers in Ethiopia, Burma, India and elsewhere, the socialist-feminist Sylvia Pankhurst joined forces with the Dorset sculptor Eric Benfield to create an Anti-Air War Monument. I’m not finished with this story yet, but a version, published in 2003, can be read on the OpenDemocracy website.

The Proms Lecture as broadcast on BBC Radio Three from the Victoria & Albert Museum at 5.30 pm on Sunday 19 August, 2001