Englishness

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the characteristics of the English identity. “An Englishman’s word is his bond”, “An Englishman’s home is his castle”. “England is a nation of shopkeepers”, but also “the most exclusive club there is”. To Cecil Rhodes to be an Englishman was to have “won first prize in the lottery of life” but to Jonathan Swift the English were “the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”. Organised, effete, cruel, brave, inventive, determined …Who are the English? And when, how and in what heat was their English identity forged? Britain has now the highest percentage of inter-racial marriages in the world. Does that say as much about the English as their previously branded characteristics of gravity, sense of order, domesticity and propriety? What was Englishness and is it possible now to define it in anything more than the loosest and baggiest terms?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Paul Langford No other episodes
  Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford
• Peter Mandler 3 episodes
  Professor of Modern History at London Guildhall University
• Professor Lola Young No other episodes
  Director of the National Museum and Archives of Black History and Culture

Related episodes

• The Nation State
  
  14 Oct, 1999 320 Political science
• The Aristocracy
  
  19 Jun, 2003 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Empiricism
  
  10 Jun, 2004 120 Epistemology
• Heritage
  
  18 Jul, 2002 940 History of Europe
• Multiculturalism
  
  13 May, 1999 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Tea
  
  29 Apr, 2004 380 Commerce, communications and transportation
• The Norman Yoke
  
  10 Apr, 2008 940 History of Europe
• Slavery and Empire
  
  17 Oct, 2002 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Republicanism
  
  3 Feb, 2000 940 History of Europe
• The British Empire’s Legacy
  
  31 Dec, 1998 320 Political science

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p00546r8

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00546r8

Auto-category: 305.800942 (Ethnic and national groups—England)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. An Englishman's word is his bond, they say.