How England Made the English: From Why We Drive on the Left to Why We Don't Talk to Our Neighbours: From Hedgerows to Heathrow [Hardcover]

The idea of this book really interested me. I'd always wondered what made England look or feel different to other countries, even just over the channel. And the chapter headings seemed a logical structure to look at this. But I kept having to re-read the chapters to try and get to the point. So for example, it's really interesting to understand how laws around 'enclosure' make our fields look the way they do but I still don't really know why that is. Clearly the author knows a lot, but as he rattles through his points and his opinions (which I didn't always agree with as an Englishman) it doesn't stop long enough to set out exactly why things are the way they are. Maybe some of these things are too complicated to explain succinctly but I found that I could fill in some of the gaps by looking at other books and Wikipedia, so I suspect it could have done with sharpening up.

All in all, I'd have preferred bigger picture, and less breezy, journalistic opinion.

This is a very gentle history of England and the English. Do not look here for rough edges, thoughtful criticism and review. Here you find an England of rose flanked doors, respectful tolerance and shy introspection.

The basic (and probably legitimate) premise of this book is that the physical nature of land, nature and weather formed the idiosyncratic character of the English. So, England made the English rather than the other way around.

Well, that's a good idea - but how long has England and the English existed? And is what the author identifies as "English" any more than the product of Victorian success and 20th Centaury decline? And is a Cornish Englishman the same as a Cumbrian? And do Cumbrians really exist, or are they ghosts of Cumberland and Westmoreland? I doubt that "English" is enough of a fixed entity to be able to pin down the factors that make them so to any one time, place or environmental factor.

I don't think you can have a book that openly admits that the geology of England is more varied than almost anywhere else on Earth, but still maintain that it is responsible in part for some overarching Englishness. Clearly England's geology has had (and still has) a profound impact on the economy of the country - but the dead coal villages of NE Somerset and Northumbria are really very, very different despite clear (but often unacknowledged) similarities.

Now, this book is interesting to read - even if I did want to argue with the author on many occasions - but some things really need to be tightened up a bit. "Most of us living in the south of England share DNA with pure blood Celts" - which would be of great interest if anybody could agree who the Celts were, and even if they actually even existed as a distinct people. "Bath ..... the only naturally occurring hot springs in England" - really? There are hot springs in nearby Bristol. I could go on - but I think I have made my point.

But in the end I think it was the circularity of some of the arguments put forward in this book that I found most hard to cope with. A love of ancient ruins is (apparently) a marker of Englishness because the English countryside has lots of them. So, where does this start? They are there because they are valued, or did they become valued because they were there?

So, this seems to a flawed, maybe inaccurate book, which nonetheless does try to look at the now contested ground of Englishness.

I would suggest you try to read a few chapters before you press purchase.

The book is overlong but it is written in a very readable, almost humourly, style, so that isn't too much of a problem. A number of the ideas that Harry Mount puts forward are thought-provoking, a number are repeats of pretty well-known facts (at least well-known to someone who has read other similar books, or been around for a while). For the last part of the book he mounts (no pun) a few hobby-horses, backed up with only one or two examples, but again this is more amusing than irritating. My advice is to buy it second-hand and then it would be value for money. It is a book for the layman, not the scholar.