Anglomania: A European Love Affair

As the question of European Union and a single currency looms, England's role in Europe has resurfaced in a passionate debate over the country's future. How is England different from the Continent and can it possibly be integrated? To answer these tough questions, Ian Buruma turns to history: In a series of insightful and witty profiles, he examines the passions of some of history's most eccentric and revolutionary Anglophiles, from Voltaire and Goethe to Pukler. England, for the Anglophile, is alternately insular and cosmopolitan, refined and painfully vulgar, bourgeois and primeval, an island of liberty accommodating to radicals and a nation of self-interested shopkeepers. Can England, then, be successfully integrated within a European system, culturally, politically, economically? Or are the differences, real and imagined, so great that England will always remain Europe's odd man out? The answers that Burma proposes in Anglomania are a testament to the breadth of his knowledge and to his ability to approach each new problem with a fresh and open mind.