A rich and charming new book....a book rooted in its author's own history....To some readers...some of the book will be familiar. Buruma is digging in ploughed fields. Still,he has a genius for digging up unlooked-for gems.The New Republic
In the last scene of The Scarlet Pimpernel , Leslie Howard is crossing the channel after having saved dozens of French aristocrats from the guillotine. On sighting the White Cliffs he turns to his wife, played by Merle Oberon, and says with a sob in his voice, "Look, Marguerite ... England!"
It brings the house down every time, Ian Buruma claims in his intriguing new book, Anglomania , because deep down we're all closet Anglophiles. And by "we," he doesn't just mean Americans. In fact, that line was written by Alexander Korda, a Hungarian, and spoken by Leslie Howard, another Hungarian, in a screenplay based on a book by yet another Hungarian, Baroness Orczy. As Buruma demonstrates, Westerners from Voltaire to Isaiah Berlin have credited the English with all sorts of attractive traits, among them heroism, tolerance and an almost childlike sense of fair play. In this engaging mix of history and reportage, Buruma explains why.
His personal Anglophilia has its origins in his childhood. Raised in Holland by a Dutch father and an English mother, he spent school holidays in England. His maternal grandparents, second-generation German-Jewish immigrants who left the slums of East London to settle in Berkshire, were more English than Lord Peter Wimsey: "Sherry on the terrace; village fetes on the lawn; cooked breakfasts kept warm under silver covers." Buruma adored his grandfather with an intensity found only in "small boys and religious fanatics," and at an early age he became convinced of the absolute superiority of life in England.
OK, so Buruma's Anglophilia has emotional roots -- but where did the rest of us get the idea? Have we all been brainwashed by centuries of fabulous PR, courtesy of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Rupert Brooke (not to mention Diana Rigg, for whom thousands of middle-aged men would lay down their lives)? Or does this myth, like so many, contain something real at its core?
Not to ruin the suspense for you, but Buruma thinks that Anglomanes are onto something: The English really are -- or, at least, were -- a special breed. Beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he writes, Britain exhibited "a remarkable combination of civility and freedom ... [it was] the only European power that had a free press, freedom of speech, and a freely elected government." Naturally enough, this atmosphere attracted intellectuals, who then passed their enthusiasm on to others.
Take the case of Voltaire, who fled to England in 1726, propelled by a brush with the Bastille over a poem that the French government considered seditious. He was enchanted: "The arts are all honored and rewarded," he wrote. "There is a difference between the stations of life but none other between men except that of merit."
When Voltaire returned to France in 1728, he brought l'anglomanie with him. English food became popular at Parisian dinner parties. French women began wearing English bonnets. Fussy French gardens were redesigned into English parks. Eventually our own Benjamin Franklin, whose love for all things French is legendary, contracted Anglomania from Voltaire. As Buruma observes, "the seed had been sown" for American Anglophilia. Could the Ralph Lauren Home Collection be far behind?
Similar patterns prevailed throughout Europe. The Germans caught Anglomania via Shakespeare, whom they adopted as a Nordic poet. In France, the Baron de Coubertin, reading about Rugby School in Tom Brown's School Days , decided that his nation could be reinvigorated by cold baths and cricket; he went on to start the modern Olympic Games.
Today, Buruma concedes, the sun is setting on Anglophilia. European unity demands that Britons abandon their image of themselves as the valiant defenders of freedom before it deteriorates into jingoism or self-parody. No longer an insular bastion of freedom peopled by the happy few, Britain will become just another cog in the European Union.
We Americans, of course, will still have PBS.Salon
Anglomania is more than a historical list. Its themes remain vitally relevant.... One of Mr. Buruma's many skills as a writer is to make you feel he is testing his views, not telling you what to think...Mr. Buruma's fluency—the ease and erudition with which he mixes anecdote, personal reminiscence and reportage—should not disguise the seriousness of this book.... It is refreshing to have a book on the subject which is not only readable and intelligent but so alive to the role of emotion and uncertainty.
...[B]rilliantly conceived, perfectly timed and dauntingly erudite.
At a time when Britain appears more amenable to--if not exactly thrilled by--the notion of integrating itself into the European Union, Buruma (The Wages of Guilt , etc.) addresses the issue of England's place in Europe by examining the long-standing European fascination with England. Cleverly integrating discussions of diverse figures such as Voltaire and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, Buruma shows how various continental Anglophiles projected onto England whatever they wished--and what they wished for, mostly, was enlightened, liberal rationalism. But at the same time, he shows how continentals became disillusioned when English reality didn't match up to their ideals. The book is a fluid hybrid of history and reportage as Buruma relates his travels through continental Europe and England. This is no mere intellectual treatise. For Buruma, the issue is also personal: although he grew up in Holland, his great-grandfather emigrated to England from Germany. Buruma, who ferried across the channel to visit his grandparents, obviously has a fascination with things English. As he weaves together his personal experiences with his insightful intellectual profiles, he argues that integration will solidify England's contributions to Europe (rationalism, free trade, representative government, a traditional counterweight to continental technocracy) while expediting the due disintegration of England's hoary anachronisms (an archaic aristocracy and its stodgy accoutrements). A fine writer with a sense of how the personal is not just political but also historical, Buruma makes a strong, literate case that integration need not mean a loss of English sovereignty: it can also mean that England's cultural DNA, as it were, will survive and thrive in a larger Europe.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Noted Anglo-Dutch writer Buruma (The Wages of Guilt , LJ 6/1/94) uses portraits of historical Anglophiles (and some Anglophobes) to meditate on the concepts of "British liberty" and national character. Some portraits are amusing, like that of Pierre, Baron de Coupertin, whose fascination with English public-school sports led him to found the modern Olympics. We see Voltaire making roast beef and pudding fashionable in Paris and Goethe turning Shakespeare into the quintessential German playwright. Many portraits are more tragic, though, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, who idolized his uncle's British Navy even while trying to conquer it. The concepts of free speech, assimilation, and European unity weave their way throughout the portraits. Buruma's prose really blossoms, though, when he examines his own Anglophile childhood and describes how his Anglo-German grandparents rescued 12 Jewish children in 1939. Recommended for larger public collections and where there is strong interest in England. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/98.]--Robert Persing, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., Philadelphia
It's probably essential to come at this subject from a slight angle, and Ian Buruma possesses a perspective that fits him very well for the task in hand....This book could hardly be any better. It is learned and witty and serious all at the same time, and I say this with all the authority of a personal friend of the author's.National Review
[This is] both a memoir and a work of intellectual history....The book does not strive to be comprehensive....Buruma follows his own interests through various odd manifestations of Anglomania....Preoccupation with Anglomaina [when] the British Empire is a distant memory for most people...seems itself to be an anachronistic symptom of British provincialism — a contradition Buruma is aware of...The New York Times Book Review
A breezy history of the political science of England-loving. In the interests of personal disclosure, journalist Buruma (The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, 1994) begins by confessing his Anglophilic background: a childhood in a snobbishly bourgeois, cricket-watching, club-tie-wearing Hague neighborhood, with an English mother and visits to Berkshire-based grandparents. He concludes with the funeral of "the last Englishman", a Jewish refugee from Riga who shaped himself into a renowned Oxford don and who upheld Enlightenment-founded English liberalism: Sir Isaiah Berlin. Anglophilia's double appeal to both snobs and liberals (in the classic sense) propels his diverting tour of England-lovers, including Voltaire and Goethe, exiles and freedom fighters such as Herzen and Mazzini, and eccentrics like the public school fan and Olympics founder Baron de Coubertin and the indefatigable architectural cataloguer Dr. Nikolaus Pevsner (author of the 50-volume Buildings of England), as well as some unreconciled haters, including the Londoner Karl Marx and Queen Victoria's obstreperous grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm. Although Buruma enlivens his historical examples with contemporary parallels, particularly with modern Americophilia, his discussion is generally Eurocentric, omitting significant instances of Anglomania in Japan and the US, which has produced such great Englishmen as Henry James and T.S. Eliot. Anglomania's subtext, more relevant for an England facing European union than one dwelling on imperial nostalgia and the "special relationship," is how England's national identity is changing (not necessarily improving) at the century's close. Its approach to serioussubject matter under cover of self-deprecating wit and mild eccentricity is, as Spectator contributor Buruma knows, typically English. As Buruma's colorfully drawn discursion illustrates, there'll always be an England, as long as there are Anglophiles.
