‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.” So observed Hungarian journalist George Mikes in How to Be an Alien (1946), one of the finest examples of a tradition in which foreigners explain Britain to itself. From Voltaire to VS Naipaul, outsiders have often illuminated national peculiarities, revealing contradictions so embedded in British life that they pass unnoticed. Helene von Bismarck’s Fantastic Kingdom is the latest contribution to this genre.
Von Bismarck, a distant relative by marriage of the Iron Chancellor, seems ideally placed for the task. The name alone gives her project a certain piquancy; there is something almost
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