Englishness Books

Bill Bryson invented over ninety of our best loved writers, broadcasters and commentators to pick their ‘icons of England’. The resulting celebration of the English countryside is an ...

In this completely revised and updated edition of international bestseller Watching The English, anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people....

Legend has it that Cornwall was named after a Trojan hero Corineus, who supposedly rid the area of a giant, throwing his victim over a cliff still known as a Giant’s Leap. Ipswitch used to be...

Beginning at the top of a muddy Gloucestershire slope at the Coopers Hill cheese-rolling contest and traversing a landscape of lawns and queues, coastlines and sporting arenas, Ben Fogle takes us on a...

If there is one thing that first-time visitors to England find mystifying - along with our fondness for eating chips out of old newspapers, our nostalgia for the shipping forecast (even though most of...

The English are often confused about who they are. They say 'British' when they mean 'English', and 'English' when they should say 'British'. And when England, more tha...

We’re Aman, Victoria, Amelia, Tandi and George- and we’re ready to take you on a journey through twelve months in the life of English kids. Enjoy festivals and events, games and sports, fl...

If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. They first came into...

England, says Matthew Engel, is the most complicated place in the world. And, as he travels through each of the historic English counties, he discovers that's just the start of it. Every county is...

After much research about (and in) pubs, Albert Jack brings together the stories behind pub names to reveal how they offer fascinating and subversive insights on our history, customs, attitudes and jo...

Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English. From its mongrel ...

There is a powerful sense of place at the seaside. You know what to expect. Fishing villages usually have a pier, boats, lobster pots, and masses of seagulls while resort towns have esplanades, piers,...

For most of us, school was our first detailed experience of a building outside the homes of our parents, friends and relations. Many people react emotionally when their old school, charged with so man...

From King Athelstan to Queen Elizabeth II, this deck of all 59 English monarchs effortlessly tells a story that spans more than 1,000 years. Featuring portraits from prestigious galleries like the Nat...

The Garden City Movement provided a radical new model for the design and layout of housing at the turn of the nineteenth century and set standards for the twentieth century which were of international...

England has a long and historic relationship with the sea. The source of a bountiful harvest of seafood that has sustained the population, it provides trade routes and a final line of defense against ...