By all accounts, we English are on our last legs. We have huge debts, inefficient industries, antiquated unions, uncompetitive managements, inadequate exports, depleted reserves, congested roads, decadent adolescents, decayign cities, and we are trying to support the crumbling ruins of a derelict empire with an impotent army and a doubtful currency.

          Yet we spend more money on Christmas shopping each year; estate agents report a demand for expensive houses; Soho strip joints make Paris seem a Puritan stronghold; Carnaby Street clothes and Liverpool pop groups have a joyful abandon that has made them famous around the world. Is this the last luxurious fling of a declining Empire?

          We have been told that our three most enduring characteristics are hypocrisy, frigidity and snobbery. Have they vanished beneath a new wave of honesty, warmth and equality? Probably not. But this is the first of the questions which are examined – seriously but not solemnly – in TO ENGLAND WITH LOVE, which explains and wickedly illustrates modern English attitudes toward their rulers, their class structure, themselves and their European neighbours – to everything, indeed, that makes an Englishman a mad dog still.