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'An entertaining and clever book. Do read it.' – Daily Telegraph

In Watching the English anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and byzantine codes of behaviour.

The rules of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo and many more . . .

Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments (using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten behaviour codes tell us about Englishness.

'I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentry in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizzare beliefs and mysterious customs, when the wierdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right on our doorstep.'

In Watching the English Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and Byzantine codes of behaviour. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue - and moan about it all - exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey.

Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments (using herself as a reluctant guinea pig), Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten behaviour codes tell us about Englishness.

Watching the English is written with an insider's knowledge but from an outsider's perspective. If you are English, it will make you stand back and re-examine everything you normally take for granted, discover just how English you really are - and laugh ruefully at yourself. If you aren't English, you can laugh without squirming: you will finally understand all our peculiar little ways. If you wish, you can become as English as we are - Englishness is not a matter of birth, race, colour or creed. It is a mindset, based on a set of behaviour-codes that anyone can decipher and apply - now that Kate Fox has provided the key.