This book could have been entitled alternatively ‘the enigma of English national identity’. For it attempts to answer such questions as: why does ‘English nationalism’ sound so strange to English ears? Why is it – more than in most other cases – so elusive, so difficult to pin down? When – if at all – did it emerge? What is the relation of English national identity to the national identities of those other peoples – the Welsh, Scots and Irish – who share with the English the two islands off the northwestern coast of Europe? Can we separate English from British national identity and, if so, how?

That these questions need to be asked suggests the peculiarity of the English case. It is not so much that English national identity cannot be distinguished by its ‘content’ – its self-conceived differences, flattering to the national pride, from other nations. This by itself is not unusual. What we call content is in most cases the product of the process by which nations are formed, rather than some qualities intrinsic or special to the nation in question. It is common enough for nations, as for individuals, to develop a sense of themselves by a process of opposition and exclusion. What they are – French, German – is defined by what they are not – German, French. The ‘content’ of national identity is more often than not a counter-image of what is seen as distinctive in the culture of the other nation or nations.