In the United States, 'English' can mean 'spin': a deliberate turn put on a ball by striking it so that it swerves. It's a subtle epithet, perhaps recording a canny colonial take on the larger distortions inseparable from imperial rule. But the truth is that as the English invented 'Great Britain' and then began the process of large-scale colonisation, they put quite a lot of English on 'Englishness' itself. Broadening as the Empire grew, its characteristics blossomed, not from the blood and soil of a single nation, reflecting its culture or essentialising its way of life, so much as from a vaguely conceived, free-floating notion of 'humanity' itself.

LRB 7 February 2002 | PDF Download