The idea that the English have a national character sounds plausible enough, until you start to try to pin it down. Are the English the romantic, imaginative people of Shakespeare and Keats, or the efficient imperialists who lorded it over India and Africa? The introverts whose motto is “No sex please, we’re British,” or the swingers of Carnaby Street and Cool Britannia? The sneering redcoats of the American Revolution, or the plucky Londoners of the Blitz? Is the archetypal Englishman John Bull, or Colonel Blimp, or Monty Python? Whoever he is, it begins to look like he has a split personality: he is an adventurous homebody, coldly sentimental, genteelly vulgar. As Daniel Defoe wrote more than 300 years ago, “from a mixture of all kinds began / That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman.”