What does it mean to be British?

The comic writer George Mikes, who died nearly 40 years ago, knew he had made it when he received a fan letter one day from Albert Einstein. Mikes, the scientist said to him, was blessed with ‘radiant humour… Everyone must laugh with you, even those who are hit with your little arrows.’

Chief among Mikes’s targets were the British people, whom the writer – a refugee from Hungary – had chosen to spend the greater part of his life among. He had come to the UK on a visit in 1938 and wisely, given what would happen to his country in the years that followed, decided never to leave. Though it describes an England now long vanished, his 1946 book How to be an Alien, a comic study of the country and its foibles, brought him fame and acceptance. It was published, he wrote, ‘at a moment when the English were in an introspective mood, preoccupied with themselves and their status in the world… A little foreigner came along and made fun of them but that was all right, they had always been proud of being able to laugh at themselves… My book flattered them, although I never meant it to.’