Martin Amis's England

'It seems to me that you need a lot of courage

'or a lot of something to enter into others, into other people.

'We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses,

'behind moats, behind sheer walls,

'studded with spikes and broken glass.

'But, in fact, we inhabit much punier structures.

'We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built or not even.

'You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent

'and crawl right in, if you get the OK.'

MUSIC: "The Lark Ascending" by Vaughan Williams

We're definitely an island and you're reminded of that every day,

because the weather changes a dozen times

in the course of the day.

It's island weather.

And, if anything shapes a national character,

I think weather is perhaps the most important thing of all.

The English feel that they are distinct from Europe

and a very deep resistance to the euro.

But also tugged across the Atlantic, too.

So, it's a good location,

just off the corner of this great Eurasian mass

and directed across the Atlantic.

Martin Amis is one of Britain's leading writers today.

His work includes London Fields,

Money, The Information,

Experience and Lionel Asbo.

His novels display a fierce and ironic vision

of a country that's deeply uneasy with the loss

of its colonial empire and international influence.

An English person, I think,

spends less time

in self-justification.

There is less to apologise for.

Do you think it matters for a German to pretend

they're Dutch when they travel?

And you don't have to do that if you're English.

'Till we have built Jerusalem

'in England's green and pleasant land.'

And he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate.

No! No, no.

'We shall defend our island,

'whatever the cost may be.

'We shall fight on the beaches.

'We shall fight on the landing grounds.'

And racist abuse and racist attacks

have no place in the Britain we believe in.

CROWD CHANTS

'And that the government of the people, by the people

'and for the people...'

# Glad tidings of a newborn king... #

BELL TOLLS

# O gee, I love him

# I can't deny it

# I'll be with him wherever he goes

# He stands on the corner and whistles me out

# He shouts oo-ey, oo-ey, are you coming out?

# O gee, I love him... #

When JG Ballard came to England in 1946, 1947,

having been interned in Shanghai by the Japanese,

he said, "Getting off the boat,

"I was convinced that England had lost the war."

And for many years, it looked like a defeated nation.

Rationing,

no street lights at night, dank.

And this is the world described in Orwell's 1984.

He was, in fact, writing about the physical furniture of 1948,

where your socks were greasy under your feet

and disintegrated after a couple of weeks.

But that was the texture of Britain.

# Alive, alive-O

# Alive, alive-O

# Alive, alive-O

# Crying cockles and mussels... #

'This is The Festival.

'Something Britain devised halfway through this century as

'a milestone between past and future to enrich and enliven the present.

'A diverse place of serious fun

'and light-hearted solemnity,

'reclaimed from the bomb wreck and the decay of years.

'Here, in the heart of London.'

In my teens, we got a little bit more prosperous.

I've tried to describe this in fiction,

that we were the exemplary family

of the Golden Age.

'They were the children of the Golden Age, 1948? to 1973.

'Elsewhere known as Il Miracolo Economico,

'Les Trente Glorieuses, Der Wirtschaftswunder.

'The Golden Age, where they never had it so good.

'In the Golden Age, progress music

'was heard in the background by nearly everybody.

'The first phone, the first car, the first house,

'the first summer holiday, the first TV, all to progress music.'

Modernity with a benign face

and our family was exemplary.

MUSIC: "The Lark Ascending" by Vaughan Williams

My father's father was a clerk in Colman's Mustard

with responsibility for South America, funnily enough.

But he was obviously lower-middle-class

in all sorts of ways, South London.

Mildly, jokily anti-Semitic,

appalled to see black people driving cars in Washington

when he came to join us in America.

Full of Philistine prejudices and so on.

And I adored him.

I was very poor when I was a baby,

then things began to look up

when my father's first novel was published when I was seven.

And life visibly improved

and continued to improve.

But, even then, there was

no question of bursting into the upper middle classes.

You were still very...

You were completely defined by your birth, not by your achievements.

I look down on him, because I am upper class.

I look up to him, because he is upper class.

But I look down on him because he is lower class.

I am middle-class.

I know my place.

I look up to them both.

But I don't look up to him as high as I look up to him.

Because he's got innate breeding.

I have got innate breeding,

but I have not got any money.

So, sometimes, I look up to him.

I still look up to him,

because although I have money, I am vulgar.

LAUGHTER

But I am not as vulgar as him.

So I still look down on him.

I know my place.

AMIS: When I was in my mid teens,

I was obsessed by class and ambitious to rise up from,

you'd have to say, lower middle-class origins.

I remember doing a quiz in the Daily Mail,

which was "How posh are you?"

It was things like. "What do you call it - lavatory or toilet or WC?"

And I'd... "lavatory".

"Couch, settee or sofa?" Sofa.

I knew I was doing terribly well in this quiz.

I came to the last question, which was,

"What would you name your son?"

One was Montague and Chumley and Sebastian.

And I thought, no, that's a bit too much.

Quentin. I said, "No, won't be that."

B was George, Henry, David.

And I thought, "That's the one."

But C was Keith, Terry and Martin.

So I threw my Biro onto the table

and knew that that was the end of that.

And then, not long afterwards,

I asked my father and I said, "What class are we?" when I was ten.

He said, "We're too intelligent to go by that system.

"We're the intelligentsia."

Your final and most important lesson,

how to spend to Daddy's lovely money.

Cheque-books open, girls.

Pens at the ready.

No, no, no, Felicity.

You couldn't possibly go shopping in Knightsbridge with one of those.

A pen with style. A pen with elan.

A Parker Lady in white rolled gold.

Noughts just seem to roll from its tip.

Signatures flow with a flourish.

My father and I got hold of some early tape,

one of his first TV interviews.

And he sounded ridiculous. "He talked like that."

In that la-di-da way,

hoity-toity, giving himself airs.

That accent has completely disappeared,

but it was almost standard for anyone who was not working class

to talk like that.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

THEY LAUGH AND SHOUT

Then there was the rise of the regional accent

and also the deliberate worsening of the accident.

We see that now extending even to grammar.

But the pressure is to join the herd.

That's the main incentive

for worsening your accent,

is to become, at least in that respect, inconspicuous.

'The 4th of June at Eton.

'On this great day, the college presents itself

'to its own world as its own world likes best to think of it,

'as the preserve of the English ruling class

'and the source of most of their virtues.

'Its world is reminded that, on these playing fields,

'the Battle of Waterloo was won by an unflappable uppercrust,

'which has never ceased since then to maintain a rich supply

'of top people from the same mould.'

It's completely changed.

When I was of that age, there was a vast gulf between

state schools and public schools.

It was a class gulf.

But now I think it's no longer a reflection of class,

it's a reflection of money.

Money... Money has won.

It had always won in America,

but it's won in England, too.

So, if you put your son's name down for Eton,

it's because you can afford to do that,

it's not because it's any class-granted right.

I have no nostalgia for the class society,

but I have no very great enthusiasm about the money society.

"Raising a yellow finger to his lower lip,

"Keith pondered the whole future of cheating.

"Cheating was his life.

"Cheating was all he knew.

"Few people had that much money any more.

"But it was quite clear that they'd never been stupider.

"The old desire for a bargain had survived into a world

"where there weren't any.

"There weren't any bargains.

"Unquestionably, you could still earn a decent living at it,

"at cheating.

"Yet no-one seemed to have thought through

"the implications of a world in which everyone cheated."

'White flannels on a green turf.

'An English sight by no means exclusive to Sussex.

'But cricket is played here with

'such a death or glory gusto that many of

'our greatest players think of Sussex

'as the very nursery of the game.'

-How's that?

-How's that?

To use another class axiom,

football is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans,

rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen

and cricket is a game for gentlemen played by gentlemen.

CROWD CHEERS

CROWD CHANTS

-CHANTING:

-We love you, we love you, we love you.

HE SHOUTS

It was nowhere near...

Football's this tribal sport.

It's a pack acting in concert.

And that's perhaps why it attracts violent supporters.

And it's never been like that for me.

It's more, slightly more, aesthetic appreciation, in my case.

If it's a match between England and Germany,

a sort of mass hysteria comes over you

and I am invaded by the emotions of religion and war.

And I don't like it.

And I can't watch those matches sometimes.

I very much distrust the feelings it awakens in me.

CROWD GROANS

I hate the opponents and I love my team

and it's shameful, but real.

BAND PLAYS

The true hooligan, the violence is what they're interested in.

The thrill of violence.

You read accounts of organised football violence

and there are middle-aged men in tracksuits running backwards,

briefing a column of young thugs, saying,

"It's going to go off. It's going to go off."

There's a lot of energy.

And it is paramilitary,

and obviously to do with the salient fact about British life,

which is that it's a nation that has suffered a truly dramatic

decline in the middle of the last century

and it's just beginning to...

Well, it's working its way through that.

'Autumn 1956. And crisis in the Middle East.'

There was Suez, perhaps, where we tried to behave like a major power

and got humiliatingly brought to heel by the Americans.

But we've accepted, really, that we're a second

or even a third echelon power without much...without disasters.

CROWD CHANTS

But it's an assertion of that kind of self-righteous...

The common man given power over someone,

as they might have done in India in the 19th century.

It's a very ugly sight.

And to see people experimenting with power is always atrocious.

It's a feeble copy of imperial power, but that's...

The impulse comes from there, I think.

It's hard to remember or even believe

how one colour England used to be.

I was seven or eight, I was already stealing cigarettes,

by the time I met the first black person in my experience.

And it was very weird.

I was going with my father to meet a Rhodesian academic and,

on the bus, he patiently schooled me.

He said, "He's going to be black.

"He's going to have a black face, black hands.

"He's going to be black."

And I was thinking, "Yeah," you know, "I understand.

"Why is he going on about it so much?"

I was ushered into the room with my father

and there he was

and I burst into tears and said,

"You've got a black face."

And I felt terrible and I knew it was an awful thing to do and say.

But it was such a shock to my small system.

MUSIC: "The Lark Ascending" by Vaughan Williams

In the later half of the 20th century, what helped England through

was ideology of multiculturalism

and anti-imperialism and levelism.

So losing your empire didn't seem so bad,

because you didn't want an empire.

You were ashamed of ever having had an empire.

And that...that sweetened the pill of decline.

MUSIC: "The Lark Ascending" by Vaughan Williams

Multiculturalism was tremendously powerful

for a good two or three decades, I would say.

It is probably weaker now than it used to be,

because it's a luxury, that ideology.

It's what you do when you have money in the bank.

And now there is no money in the bank

and that kind of pan-tolerance will contract,

because it's too...altruistic for hard times.

There is great tolerance now

and almost a sort of harmonial feeling,

but in rough areas, it's just as bad as it ever was.

It's not like America. America is...

The great thing about America is that it's an immigrant society,

and a Pakistani in Boston can say, "I'm an American,"

and all he's doing is stating the obvious.

But a Pakistani in Preston who says, "I'm an Englishman,"

that statement would raise eyebrows for the reason

that there's meant to be another layer of being English.

That it is...

that there are other qualifications

other than being a citizen of the country.

And it has to do with white skin

and the habits of what is regarded to be civilised society.

And recognisable, bourgeois society.

POP MUSIC PLAYS

POP MUSIC MORPHS INTO CEREMONIAL MUSIC

'London, and the State Opening of Parliament,

'the occasion on which the people see their Queen

'in her most royal estate.

'And Balmoral in Scotland,

'where a young mother spends precious summer days

'with her family.

'Two pictures of the same woman,

'which tell, in part,

'something of the mysterious bonds that unite...'

My father used to hang out with the Queen a bit,

went to lunch there several times, and he was knighted by her.

He was very keen on her and even used to have erotic dreams about her.

And I said to him, "What happens in these dreams of yours?"

And he said, "Well, nothing much," he said.

"She's on my lap, and I'm feeling her tits and kissing her."

ALL: God save the Queen! God save the Queen!

'At her coronation, her husband, Prince Philip,

'kisses her cheek and swears allegiance,

'mitigating something of the loneliness of being Queen.'

And I said, "What does the Queen say in your dreams?"

He said, "Well, I'm saying, 'Come on, let's go somewhere.'

"And she says, 'No, Kingsley, we mustn't.' Or, 'We can't.' "

CHEERING

The royal family are a peculiarly British institution,

but it does have one remarkable quality.

On days like the Coronation or the Jubilee,

a peculiar atmosphere envelops the entire country.

And it's...it's entirely irrational,

but entirely benign.

And usually, when irrationality visits a country, there's not a...

to use an old phrase...there's not a virgin or an unbroken window

left in the entire country after 12 hours of that.

# Long live our noble Queen

# God save... #

It is nearing the end of the road... the monarchy.

It's connected with our love of Upstairs, Downstairs...

those country house dramas.

It's nostalgia for that class society.

It's all connected. It can't not be connected.

But, again, relatively harmless.

For a novel, The Pregnant Widow,

I had my hero change subjects

at university in his second year.

So during this very long summer holiday,

in which most of the action is set in this Italian castle,

he reads the entire English novel over three months,

starting with Richardson, Clarissa -

five volumes of hideous prurience.

And in that, the formative period of the English novel,

the only way that a heroine can have sex is by being drugged.

And that ties in with fantasies, female fantasies, of being ravished.

And I've talked to women about this, and they've said,

"It is a good fantasy, because... especially when you're young,

"because if you enjoy it, it's not your fault."

So, again, feelings of guilt very much to the fore.

But when we get to Fielding,

who's a near contemporary of Richardson,

there is a sort of division, a class division is made,

where a farm girl can have sex,

and a decadent society lady can have sex,

but Sophia Western, in Tom Jones,

can't have sex, because she's the heroine.

It's not compatible with being a heroine.

In Jane Austen, going forward,

in all six of her novels,

there will be a woman, a young girl of good family,

who errs in that direction.

The great exception is Elizabeth Bennet in Pride And Prejudice,

where it's perfectly clear that she is, far and away,

the most sexual of Jane Austen's heroines.

Mr Darcy!

Miss Bennet!

Towards...

ten pages from the end of the book,

Mr Bennet takes Elizabeth aside

and says,

"Do you really love Mr Darcy?"

And the reader, by this time, is horrified,

because we've been rooting

for Darcy and Elizabeth throughout.

And the way that's achieved

is because they're absolutely made for each other, those two.

We can tell that at once,

and that's why

there is such a passionate longing for them to be married.

But he takes Elizabeth aside and says, "Do you love Mr Darcy?"

Cos... "I know your lively talents, Elizabeth.

"You could be neither happy nor respectable in a loveless marriage."

Respectable - that's an astounding thing for Jane Austen to write,

with the clear implication that if Elizabeth married Darcy without love,

that she would have affairs.

In vain, I have struggled. It will not do.

My feelings will not be repressed.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

There are always ways of doing sex without actually doing it.

There's always been lots of stuff going on,

but it wasn't a part of civilised society.

It wasn't up for discussion... or even acknowledgement.

And the novel is very much connected with the civilised discourse.

There were, of course, sub-forms of the novel

that were rampantly sexual,

but not in the drawing rooms and farmhouses of England.

A lot of hypocrisy, also a lot of suppressed rage.

Erm...you know, and this goes on quite deep into the 20th century.

My father's first novel,

Lucky Jim...

I wondered why there was this furious humour.

Luckily, the anger takes the form of humour, and it is a very funny book.

But I realised that everyone in that novel is a virgin.

Those who aren't married are virgin.

The top of society and the bottom of society had the freedom, for different reasons,

to indulge what everyone was thinking about all the time.

But the huge middle-class didn't have that outlet.

FAST-PACED MUSIC

'To say nothing of the daring of women who braved the infernal machines

'of the pleasure beach with, here and here, a nonchalant laugh,

'and, here and there, a ladylike scream, perhaps.'

'And it behoves a gallant escort to put a protective arm

'about a lady's shoulders, seeing that that's why he invited her in the first place.

'And there's still the excitement of evening to come.'

MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH

Getting on good terms with pleasure is not an English talent, I don't think.

There is a kind of grimness in the English nature.

It's been said that the British feel Schadenfreude about themselves.

They exalt in their own misery.

A little strong, that,

but there's definitely something in it.

I don't know where it comes from, except...

centuries of Puritanism.

And of course the weather.

It's a masochist's climate in Britain.

What is the English vice? It's...spanking, is it not?

So the French have always insisted.

And a great part of Margaret Thatcher's appeal

was that if you got too dependent on the social safety net

and dependency culture, that she would smack your bottom.

And when Christopher Hitchens met her,

she did have a rolled-up bit of policy document

and she said, "Turn around," and spanked him on the bottom,

because she disagreed with him. I mean, it's all playful.

CALYPSO MUSIC

Certainly, the biggest social convulsion in my lifetime

was the sexual revolution. You remember the Larkin poem...

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was a little late for me) -

Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

'The first clause in the revolutionary manifesto

'went as follows: there will be sex before marriage.

'Sex before marriage, for almost everyone.

'And not only with the person that you're going to get married to.

'It was very simple, everyone knew it,

'everyone has seen it coming for years.

'In certain quarters, though,

'sex before marriage was a distressing development.

'Who was distressed by it?

'Those for whom there had NOT been sex before marriage.

'Nicholas, when he was coming of age in the mid-1960s,

'found himself involved in a series of long, boring, repetitive

'and in fact completely circular arguments with his father.'

That didn't happen to me,

cos my father had already had that battle with his father.

My father was almost embarrassingly permissive.

One night, I had a girlfriend over,

and in the middle of the night,

she went to the bathroom,

and I give her directions,

but she went into my father's room,

my father and stepmother's bedroom,

waking them up and all that.

And then I found a note under my...

the next morning, a note under my door saying,

"Your friend is very welcome to stay for breakfast,

"but please be discreet about Mrs Lucy,"

who was the cleaning woman.

MUSIC: "A Taste Of Honey" by Herb Alpert

And I'd spent my early, mid-teens, on into latish teens,

spending hours trying to begin

to seduce girls who were absolutely like fortresses, you know.

And in my marathon seduction efforts,

the most adamant were the working-class girls, by far.

They really were living chastity belts.

But with upper-middle and upper,

there was much more immediate hope.

I think, what you'd call the yellow press, or the red tops,

that's another level of scurrility.

In a way, it is consonant with British decline,

in that it shows an absolute obsession

with surfaces and superficialities,

and perhaps that is in tune

with the general coarsening of the British nature.

They wouldn't be there unless there was something

in the British character that wanted it to be so.

I think the press is actually far more...vicious

than the average Englishman or woman.

We see this occasionally - we actually glimpse this, in that

at the time of Princess Diana's death,

newspapers were frantically putting on the cover

pictures of Diana as an angel,

sort of fluttering through the clouds,

while wrenching out of the middle pages

some scurrilous attack on her

as a feckless slut who sleeps with Arabs.

They were taken by surprise

by this millennial sentimentality

that was the response to her death.

In fact, the man in the street and the woman in the street

don't like that kind of viciousness

and they are much more sentimental than the press,

although sentimentality is, of course,

the other side of the coin of brutality.

Dashed shame, really.

She was a fine old ship.

They didn't mention the "old" bit when I booked my passage.

Come off it, old chap.

Still - pity she went down before we'd finished dinner.

-Missed the liqueurs, what?

-Could have done with a drop meself.

Hear! Hear!

-HE WHISPERS

-I'm afraid I might have some rather bad news for some of you.

Davis only had time to bring the port.

It's my after-dinner tipple,

but...what about the rest of you?

I should say so, sir!

-"Cock"-burns, is it?

-"Cock"-burns?

"Cock"-burns! Very good.

Oh, you mean Cockburns! Yes.

Special Reserve.

VOICEOVER: After dinner, a bottle of port is really all you need.

MARTIN AMIS: We'd be letting ourselves down if we didn't talk

about English drunkenness,

which has no equivalent in southern Europe, certainly.

It's not considered amusing

in France or Italy to be drunk.

But if you go out on any night in any city in England,

there are people in utter disarray with drink.

You look out at a landscape and everyone's drunk.

And it's not just at weekends.

PUB HUBBUB

But there is an atmosphere of hysterical festivity

underwritten by potential violence.

English drunkenness has always seemed to me

very, very key to the national character.

# What a rotten song... #

It's the quest for oblivion, it's not for heightening

your consciousness.

It is the other element,

it's this sort of feeding frenzy of drink

that you see in every city every night in England.

They drink to forget, forget their glorious past,

reconcile themselves with their reduced present.

It's drowning their sorrows,

it's not celebratory, it's the opposite.

That kind of self-punishing drinking

departs from any notion of pleasure.

There's something voulu about it,

that the high spirits are kind of willed.

Do the men really have to guffaw like that

to show that they're having a good time?

Do the women have to cackle with giggles

quite as loudly as they do?

There is a sort of tinge of desperation.

There is that sense of an orgy in the vomitorium,

making one wonder if English repression

is still something that menaces young people, even today.

The idea that only when you're completely lost to shame,

because of drink,

that you can then indulge yourself sexually.

-NEWS REPORT:

-The advanced party of up to 10,000 fans

coming to Athens in search of a good time,

a good tan and a good result.

The Football Disorder Act is a response to scenes

like these in Belgium last year...

MARTIN AMIS: In the '60s,

and when I started going just with friends and not with family,

I started to feel what the English abroad do feel,

which is hostility,

a resentful sense of superiority,

a great feeling of insecurity

that the Continent is actually much more sophisticated and advanced

then the home island.

This is why English people get drunk

when they go abroad. I mean, they get drunk when they stay at home, too.

But they get drunk to

overcome that feeling of insecurity which then turns into aggression.

The pattern we all know and have seen many times.

DANCE MUSIC PLAYS

We talk about national characteristics

and you have to have the freedom to generalise.

But as soon as you get into negative characterisations, people get anxious.

I remember my father writing in, it must have been about 1980,

a little riff that you probably couldn't print now,

which was quite mild, really, but he said...

he was wondering if there was any correlation

national character and national cuisine.

He said, "Let's think. England.

"Nice people, nasty food.

"France. Nice food, nasty people.

"Spain. Nice people, nasty food.

"Italy. Nice people, nice food.

"Germany. Nasty food, nasty people."

MUSIC: "The Last Living Rose" by PJ Harvey

# Goddamn Europeans

# Take me back to beautiful England

# And the great, damp filthiness of

# Ages and battered books and

# Fog rolling down behind the mountains

# All the graveyards and dead sea captains

# Let me walk through the stinking alleys

# To the music of drunken beatings

# Past the Thames River glistening

# Like gold hastily sold

# For nothing

# Nothing...! #

MUSIC: "Romance for Violin and Orchestra" by Dvorak

English diffidence is in many ways a charming

and endearing quality, I think.

I remember I was teaching the novella Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth's first.

If you remember, in the film

he sees this gorgeous girl at the swimming club

and comes home and rings her up.

And I said to the class,

"If this were an English novel,

"it would need to be 300 pages long, because it would take him 120 pages

"to pluck up the courage to telephone her in the first place."

That is English diffidence.

It may look like stiffness, but again, it's a worthy diffidence.

And, very quickly,

it melts, I think.

After the initial reserve,

you will find candour and friendliness.

When you see the personal ads in America, they say,

"Super-fit, non-smoking, handsome guy

"wants to meet..." et cetera.

In England, it would be,

"Chain-smoking couch potato, loser...

"and dope wants to meet..." et cetera, et cetera.

That is a very

clear difference between the two temperaments,

the two national temperaments.

THEY PLAY FOLK MUSIC

PLAINTIVE REEL PLAYS

There is something about cricket

that is irreducibly and essentially English.

This atmosphere of being a good sport.

"It isn't cricket" means it's not, as it were, kosher.

The foundational idea is that sport is not about winning,

that it's about glory and honour.

Someone watching the Tour de France said

that drugs ruin the whole spectacle because there should be

no other factors other than the human being and the bike,

and that that was destroyed by a culture of drugging.

That's what being a good sport means.

All that is unthinkable.

And that extends as much as it can into areas like warfare.

It's statistically very plain that if you were a surrendering

enemy combatant in the Second World War,

you wanted to fall into the hands of British troops.

Certainly not Russian troops, certainly not French troops,

and preferably not American troops,

but British troops.

They had the highest survival rate.

That's sportsmanship.

That's...fairness.

Straight bat, you know.

Good play.

HE PLAYS "LAST POST"

Britain, I think rightly, derives

a great deal of strength from its performance in the Second World War.

Perhaps no other nation in Europe emerges from that war

with, intact, either the humiliation

of conquest or the humiliation of initiating the war,

or the humiliation of collaboration.

And, more materially, Hitler

conquered a string of countries in a matter of days

and sometimes a matter of hours.

Denmark, 24 hours.

France, 39 days.

Yugoslavia, seven days.

Greece, 12 days.

And leading up to the attack on Russia,

which, until halfway through 1941,

looked as if it was going to be maybe 45 days.

And the only defeat

suffered by Germany in that time was the Battle of Britain,

in 1940.

'Methinks I see in my mind a mighty and puissant Nation

'rousing herself like a strongman after sleep,

'and shaking her invincible locks.

'Methinks I see her as an Eagle

'mewing her mighty youth,

'kindling her un-dazzled eyes

'at the full midday beam,

'purging and un-scaling her long-abused sight

'at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance.'

And we... Churchill, "We stood alone."

It's not quite true - there were all these governments in exile

that were standing with us, but we stood alone

and we did prevail in the end,

although as a minor player by the time the war ended.

I think that shapes... is fit to shape

how you see yourself for generations.

NEWSREEL: This is Belsen, notorious German death camp.

The last of Belsen's living dead

are treated by British medical crews

before transfer to a live field hospital.

MARTIN AMIS: There was always a feeling,

and I think, perfectly intelligible feeling,

that a great evil had been bested in the end.

And all sorts of jingoistic feelings remained for...decades after the war.

NEWSREEL: British flame tanks fire the flimsy building.

Belsen is erased from the Earth. Buchenwald, Dachau,

Nordhausen...

MARTIN AMIS: Germany has made superhuman

efforts to come to terms with its past.

And still wants to talk about it,

and is not shying away from it.

It seems to me that France has made no efforts at all in that direction,

that the myth of the Resistance nation

has completely supplanted the reality

of the collaborationist nation.

It takes all my powers of imagination and empathy

to think myself into a French skin or a German skin for that reason.

How tremendously diminished I would be.

And that the English performance in the war,

and conduct...

is something to be proud of.

And that is not the case elsewhere.

You're talking about the influence...

Listen...listen...

You come to Speakers' Corner with the delusion

that you could be an agent, winding people up.

Then there were surpluses between nations, if you like,

so under capitalism, Marx argued...

-Yay!

-You're lost in your head.

Bye!

That happens every time I bring the Koran up to a true Muslim.

Jesus preached only three years, how could he have a big Bible?

Would you please shut up? I'm not talking to you, I'm talking about you!

When the Queen sits on the seat,

then she becomes the personification of the Crown.

Are you authorised by Her Majesty?

No, no, no, that's correct.

If one's allowed to be proud of

one's nationality, then

you would have to advance British history as

a model of moderation compared to the histories of most other countries.

England had its revolution a century earlier than the French.

Parliamentary democracy well-established

in the 18th century.

The Civil War not atrocious, as civil wars usually are.

It was fashionable for a while

to say that the strength of Russian literature

had to do with the bloodiness of Russian history.

That somehow the stakes were higher

because of the violence of that evolution,

but British poetry

is the strongest on the planet,

rivalled perhaps only by Iran, funnily enough.

And yet British history is not all blood and mire.

I am utterly comfortable with being English, as Americans might say.

It's a source of quiet pride.

MUSIC: "Romance for Violin and Orchestra" by Dvorak