But they were separated from any land-mass by the moat of the English Channel, and this made them feel a band of brothers, splendidly isolated in a silver sea.To my mind this insular self- satisfaction is sufficient explanation of Englishness. However in this erudite, extremely entertaining and eventually tantalising work Maureen Duffy explores the many other strains of legend which have combined to create the English identity. Much of her book is a spirited gallop through the entire course of relevant history, Druids to Channel Tunnel, but now and then she pauses to draw our attention to a persistent attitude, circumstance or delusion that has given continuity to England’s idea of itself.Some of these asides are wonderfully original. Who else would have thought of linking the reign of Henry VII with the depression years of the 1920s, as exemplifying the English tradition of slippered domesticity? But Henry, Duffy tells us, “shuffled through history” in a long gown and moth-eaten cap, just as an England of four centuries later, “redolent of galoshes”, huddled over its wireless sets with cups of cocoa.Many another familiar English trait is elevated here to the status of myth: love of gardening, suspicion of ideas, reliance on endurance rather than brilliance, taste for poetical patriotics, respect for Roundheads but weakness for Cavaliers. Pride in national eccentricity often crops up, as does the belief in fair play – perhaps the nearest the English have got to a popular ideology.Much of all this was wonderfully sustaining to the English through the varied fortunes of their history. It made them feel good themselves, and often it really did make them seem special.

By the time they reached their true historical apex, the 1890s, peoples around the world accepted them at their own valuation. As the New York Times gushingly proclaimed on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, “We are part, and a great part… of Greater Britain”.Within a year of two of that triumphant climax the magnificent complacency began to crack. It has been sporadically revived since, but for most of our lifetimes it has been in decline, until today it is actually transmuted into an inferiority complex. The vision of a sceptred isle seems pathetic; the glorious swagger of Empire is discredited. Who could thrill the nation now as Churchill thrilled it half a century ago? As the reality has shrunk, so has the legend, and never again will a foreigner be able to say of the English, as George Santayana once said, that not since the heroic days of Greece had the world had such sweet, just, boyish masters.Maureen Duffy tells us all too well what has happened to the myth – its replacement by squalor and self-doubt, and by what she calls Macsumerism.

We know how it happened too, as the English state lost its power, and the English people lost all conviction. What gives this book its tantalising quality is its uncertain ending. Is that all there is? Has proud England gone for good?Duffy knows of a benign new purpose for England – wholeheartedly to contribute its particular qualities to the comity of Europe. She surely realises, though, that the English are nowhere near that honourable consummation They are still reluctant, as a nation, to recognise reality. They still wish to believe themselves unique, divinely destined to bridge Europe and America. They have not grasped that even within the British islands they are no longer a cynosure – their neighbours have myths of their own, and no longer depend upon England’s.If most of the English are above parading in Union Jack boxer shorts, or embarrassing us at the Last Night of the Proms, I fear it will be many a year before the mass of them will feel natural fellow-citizens, with anyone else.