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Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

I went to the States with that amount of prejudice which seems the birthright of every English person, but I found that, under the knowledge of the Americans which can be attained by a traveller mixing in society in every grade, these prejudices gradually melted away.

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.

I believe that Britain is becoming more class-conscious, and I quake at the very idea of Old Etonians ruling the world again.

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.