A most thoughtful set of essays offering 'intimations' of that most nebulous thing, English national identity. They approach this will-o-the-wisp from several directions – sociological, political, literary – and together weave a conversation of an Oakeshottian kind, intellectual as well as pleasing. Indeed, the claim of the editors that England cannot be grasped in definitions, manifestos and deductions but only in an open-ended conversational flow seems most apt.
