"Modest, individualistic, ironic, [Paxman's] book has all the virtues he attributes to the English themselves." (Evelyn Toynton, The New York Times)

Not so long ago, everybody knew who the English were. They were "polite, unexcitable, reserved, and had hot water bottles instead of a sex life." As the dominant culture in a country that dominated an empire that dominated the world, they had little need to examine themselves and ask who they were. But now things are different, and no one is sure just what it means to be English.

Jeremy Paxman explores English attitudes to the countryside, intellectuals, food, Catholicism, and the French, and brings together insights from novelists, historians, and gentleman farmers. Witty, surprising and incisive, The English traces the invention of Englishness to its current crisis and concludes that, for all their characteristic gloom about themselves, the English may have developed a form of nationalism for the 21st century.