Lights under bushels

Here’s a question for all of you who can claim to be (or would wish to be) English. When was the last time you sold yourself short, modestly claiming, ‘Oh, it’s nothing really. I just botched it together in a rush’? Or, ‘I’m sure I know nothing about politics,’ when in reality you’re an avid reader of Fraser Nelson’s column? Or to a climate-change fanatic, ‘What was that? I didn’t understand what you said,’ when you’ve got a degree in environmental science? In recent years, we’ve been told such self-deprecation is bad for us and we need to go into therapy to retune our responses. But no longer. Or so Andrew Marr argues in Unmasking the English, his four-part series on Radio Four (Mondays).

Marr, we must remember, is a Scotsman (a nation of such primitive origins that, as Dr Johnson once said, they had to be introduced to the virtues of cabbage by Oliver Cromwell’s men).