Watching the English by Kate Fox

Why, when we bump into an English person on the street, do they apologise for our mistake? In this hilarious ethnography, Kate Fox describes a litany of English customs and rituals that continually puzzle foreigners and the English alike. Based on over a decade of research, this book explains the cultural bases of curious English behaviours, such as their obsession with the weather, their extraordinary talent for queueing, why they invented so many games, and how their social class system is maintained. Unlike other social commentators who bemoan the loss of culture, Fox argues that ”I am convinced that there is such a thing as ‘Englishness’, and that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Fox used a rather unorthodox range of research methods in order to get to the heart of what it means to be English. Apart from deliberately bumping into people to see what they did, Fox regularly had to steel her nerves to break the golden rule of not talking to strangers in public. She eavesdropped in on pub conversations and bothered people working in their front yards, all in the name of research. And she did it very well: this book is a tremendously enlightening account of what constitutes a core English cultural identity.