In Memory of England: A Novelist's View of History [Illustrated] (Hardcover)

The book is correspondingly stuffed with small scraps of information. East Anglians, he writes, swallowed live spiders as a caution against the plague. Anne Boleyn was widely believed to turn herself for intervals into a hare, a common trick among English witches, reported in Lincolnshire as late as 1969. The Habeas Corpus Act, a groundbreaking development in civil liberties, was only passed because a teller with a sense of humour counted a fat man as ten. Perhaps appropriately for a man who has taught history to the young, Vansittart dwells too on the bloodiness of the English past. Thomas Hardy is quoted on the 'fine figure' of a hanged woman he saw as a child in the 'misty rain, and how the tight black gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back'. To Charles I's execution, we are told, nervous executioners brought staples lest the monarch should struggle. Beheadings, Vansittart adds, are often accompanied by a belching sound, slightly clammy. Among the expert thumbnail sketches of British monarchs, the insights on Shakespeare, a short but vigorous discussion of the Elizabethan chimney, such details abound, sometimes almost too densely. The effect is a cumulative one: as with the National Portrait Gallery, it manages by specific vignettes to give a vivid picture of Englishness in general, of the 'juiciness of the English mind'.

Like Paxman and unlike Tony Benn ('I don't believe in Englishness. I'm a socialist') Vansittart does seem to believe in it, but, as he points out 'if it exists [it] compounds tradition and atmosphere, but scarcely race'. Iconic English figures are, when scratched, more difficult to pin down. Both Churchill and Harold Macmillan had American mothers; Rider Haggard, quintessential Victorian, had French, Danish, and Russian ancestors; Stephen Fry, regularly awarded 'national treasure' status, is half Hungarian-Jewish. Vansittart's quest to find Englishness elsewhere seems to locate it in proportion, moderation, a sticking close (with variations) to the surface of the ground. Quoting King Alfred's advice that a man seeking power must 'not be unduly subject to his vices, and... must put away... undue cares', he remarks: 'The emphasis on "undue" is already recognisably English'. Chaucer, meanwhile, is seen as having a voice almost contemporary: 'ironic, appreciative of human oddity, allergic to moralisin but noticing people's faults; tolerant, but indignant at blatant hypocrisy.'

Vansittart has spoken of himself elsewhere as a 'perhaps man', and the book is full of this balanced tone, whether discussing the pros and cons of the British Empire, or the contradictions in the character of Oliver Cromwell. This unwillingness to swim far in either direction one might see as typical too, a distrust of absolute statements and a love of compromise, borne out for him by the fact that in cricket, a key symbol for Vansittart as for Paxman, a draw can be as dramatic as victory or defeat. If there is an enemy in sight, it is neither the encroachment of the European Union nor the break-up of the British one, but the slide into political correctness, jargon, bad writing, questionable thinking, which sees a North London headmistress ban Romeo and Juliet as 'too heterosexual', or domestic violence retermed 'non-accidental injury'. These things, one senses, are for Vansittart certainly 'undue' and are correspondingly attacked. But they are attacked lightly, urbanely, as though in themselves they are not much worth getting worked up over. As an Old English poem he quotes puts it: 'That passed away, so may this.' That attitude is arguably very English too.