English Lessons

By MATT WEILAND writing in the New York Times

Published: August 22, 2008

It may be a truism that Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language, but it’s truer to say that the two nations are united by language and divided by everything else. These differences — of manners, mores, assumptions, expectations — are the subject of “The Anglo Files,” by Sarah Lyall, (pic left by Lisa Wolfe), a re­porter for The New York Times. A New Yorker by origin and temperament, Lyall married an Englishman (the editor and writer Robert McCrum) and moved to London in the mid-1990s. “The Anglo Files” collects and expands on Lyall’s dispatches from her adopted home in the decade and a half since then. The result is what she calls a “field guide to the British.”

THE ANGLO FILES
A Field Guide to the British
By Sarah Lyall
289 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95

Lyall is a first-rate reporter, and her book has all the hallmarks of her journalism: it is warm, blunt, confessional, companionable. Which is to say: it is very American. The country she describes, “that oldest and most charismatic of nation-states,” as the writer Jan Morris once called it, is cold, private, oblique to the point of opacity and reticent to the point of silence. Which is to say: it is very British. The book’s charm lies in the collision of these two facts.

Lyall organizes “The Anglo Files” around lean case studies of British institutions (Parliament, cricket, drink) and traits (love of liberty and animals, obsession with the weather). She recounts, for example, the 2003 battle on the Hebridean island of North Uist between hedgehog lovers and wading-bird enthusiasts over an invasion of hedgehogs, which eat the birds’ eggs. Lyall makes plain not just the passion of British animal lovers, but their organizational zeal: Scottish Natural Heritage, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, Uist Hedgehog Rescue and the Uist Wader Project fought for years before agreeing the alien hedgehogs should be airlifted back to the mainland rather than killed.

Read the full picee at the NYT online.