How to Be English

**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.