Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour

In WATCHING THE ENGLISH anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and byzantine codes of behaviour. The rules of weather-speak.

The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule.

Class indicators and class anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo and many more . . . Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments (using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten behaviour codes tell us about Englishness.