'Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,' the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. 'The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process.' The quote is not from Blunkett's diaries but from the funniest book currently available in the English language, published by the Home Office, and called Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship. The fact that the book is supposed to be very serious somehow makes it funnier, much as those 1970s public information films about keeping away from strangers and electricity pylons used to reduce children like me to tears of laughter when they were meant to fill us up to the brim with the fear of God.

LRB 16 November 2006 | PDF Download